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Laplace’s Theories of Cognitive Illusions, Heuristics and Biases (columbia.edu)
65 points by nabla9 on June 7, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments



The second Laplace quotation in their paper is rather pithy:

"The mind, like the sense of sight, has its illusions; and just as touch corrects those of the latter, so thought and calculation correct the former. (Laplace, 1825, p. 91)"

(Paper at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3149224, link in a first Mar. 2018 post, linked by this post).

P.S.

as an amusing bonus to the 2018 post, a commenter quoted "Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity."

It's from Jonah 1:7, which I hadn't come across before. I'm now trying to resist the rabbit hole: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy


The paper is interesting, thanks for pointing it out. They make a curious reference to the US political elections in 2016 that could have probably been replaced by a less 2010s-US-centered topic.

For those skeptical of the necessity to revisit centuries-old documents for anything other than the history of science, the authors give their insights at the end of the paper:

> Laplace’s attempts to understand the underlying mechanisms for people’s biases were highly original, insightful, in many ways were centuries ahead of their time, and in at least two instances produced novel conjectures that have not been tested to this day. We believe that modern-day social and behavioral scientists can benefit from revisiting Laplace’s thinking on illusions in the estimation of probabilities, and beyond.


Can we all agree that "lies, damn lies, and statistics" should be originally attributed to Laplace? ;-)


Hume laid the philosophical foundations of empiricism for Laplace.




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