I work in the risk assessment space, so they are kind of critical to be aware of, for me :)

Adding my own explanation, because I think it clicks better for me (especially when I write it down):

1. Pick a door. You have a 66% chance of picking a wrong door, and a 33% of picking the right door.
2. Monty excludes a door with 100% certainty
3. IF you picked a wrong door, then there’s a 100% chance the remaining door is correct (so the contingent probability is p(switch|picked wrong) = 100%), so the total chance of the remaining door being correct is p(switch|picked wrong)* p(picked wrong) = 66%.
4. IF you picked the right door, then Monty’s reveal gives you no new information, because both the other doors were wrong, so p(switch|picked right) = 50%, which means that p(switch|picked right) * p(picked right) = 50% * 33% = 17%.
5. p(don't switch|picked wrong) * p(picked wrong) = 50% * 66% = 33% (because of the remaining doors including the one you picked, you have no more information)
6. p(don't switch|picked right) * p(picked right) = 50% * 33% = 17% (because both of the unpicked doors are wrong, Monty didn’t give you more information)

So there’s a strong benefit of switching (66% to 33%) if you picked wrong, and even odds of switching if you picked right (17% in both cases).

Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.

Thanks for the help, it was easier this time 😅

It’s extremely useful, because it’s an index to all the known things that might be useful in a given situation. The point is not to assess all of them, the point is to not miss ones you’re unfamiliar with that may be important in your situation.

Yeah, that’s fair, for sure, to some degree. For instance large fractions of policing funding should be redirected into various social services, and military spending can get fuck off all together.

But also, wealthier people paying more than an equal share of tax is a good thing too, and provides lots of intangible benefits (e.g. better education systems and fewer people in extreme poverty and desperation leads to lower crime rates)

I think they probably appear in different types of situations, not all at once. And maybe different types of people/thinking are more prone to some than to others.

Really? The birthday problem is a super simple multiplication, you can do it on paper. The only thing you really need to understand is the inversion of probability (P(A) = 1 - P(not A)).

The Monty hall problem… I’ve understood it at times, but every time I come back to it I have to figure it out again, usually with help. That shit is unintuitive.

Less tax is better.

No saying that taxation as it currently exists it optimal, but any decent assessment of how to improve things requires a lot of nuance that is nearly never considered by most people.

The sky isn’t blue in many cultures. It’s been shown that words for blue only occur in a language after that culture has discovered a blue dye. And that limitation in available words also constrains how you see and think about the world.

This is covered in Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language, which is an excellent read.

One of my favourite pages on wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases