As a Turk, I strongly believe that story is fictional.
Where and how was this ban issued? Can you give more details?
You may be hearing some fictional story based on his social reforms.
See here
And the veil, currently banned in public universities, is still very much a hot button issue. Also, a large segment of the Turkish population still wears the veil. The country is deeply divided over this issue.
Don’t get over-excited. You are still losing money in a less than fair-odds situation.
And since most people don’t stop gambling until they have some deficit from gambling, casinos usually make more than the odds give them.
There is nothing in what I wrote that implies people value their lives infinitely. People just need to value their lives highly enough such that flying on an airplane (with its probability of crashing) has a negative expected value.
Again, from Nick Bostrom’s article:
“Pascal: I must confess: I’ve been having doubts about the mathematics of infinity. Infinite values lead to many strange conclusions and paradoxes. You know the reasoning that has come to be known as ‘Pascal’s Wager’? Between you and me, some of the critiques I’ve seen have made me wonder whether I might not be somehow confused about infinities or about the existence of infinite values . . .
Mugger: I assure you, my powers are strictly finite. The offer before you does not involve infinite values in any way. But now I really must be off; I have an assignation in the Seventh Dimension that I’d rather not miss. Your wallet, please!”
‘Small enough’ here would have to be very much smaller than 1 in 100 for this argument to begin to apply. It would have to be ‘so small that it won’t happen before the heat death of the universe’ scale. I’m still not sure the argument works even in that case.
How small should x be? And if the argument does hold, are you going to have two different criteria for rational behavior—one with events where probability of positive outcome is 1-x and one that isn’t.
And also, from Nick Bostrom’s piece (formatting will be messed up):
Mugger: Good. Now we will do some maths. Let us say that the 10 livres that you have in your wallet are worth to you the equivalent of one happy day. Let’s call this quantity of good 1 Util. So I ask you to give up 1 Util. In return, I could promise to perform the magic tomorrow that will give you an extra 10 quadrillion happy days, i.e. 10 quadrillion Utils. Since you say there is a 1 in 10 quadrillion probability that I will fulfil my promise, this would be a fair deal. The expected Utility for you would be zero. But I feel generous this evening, and I will make you a better deal: If you hand me your wallet, I will perform magic that will give you an extra 1,000 quadrillion happy days of life. … Pascal hands over his wallet [to the Mugger].
Of course, by your reasoning, you would hand your wallet. Bravo.
Is the problem that 0.01 or 0.05 too high?
Take a smaller value then.
In fact, people take such gambles (with negative expectation but with high probability of winning) everyday.
They fly on airplanes and drive to work.
Thanks, I already knew about this.
Related is also Martingale gambling.
I think it’s hard to enjoy gambling if you are sure you’ll lose money, which is how I feel like. I may be over pessimistic.
Roulette gives you odds of 1.111 to 1 if you place on Red or Black with expectation −0.053 on the dollar. So I may be over-pessimistic. See the wiki entry.
The nonlinear utility of money?
Well, the point I was trying to make was supposed to be abstract and general. Nick Bostrom’s Pascal’s Mugging piece argues for a very similar (if not identical) point. Thanks for letting me know about this.
And yes, I’m bad at dealing with small probabilities. I feel that these evoke some philosophical questions about the nature of probability in general—or whatever we talk about when we talk about probabilities.
Obviously, this needs more discussion but the kind of thought I was trying to motivate was the following:
How is that saying a non-repeating singular event has a very small probability of occurring different from saying it will not happen?
This was motivated by the lottery paradox. Questions like, when you buy a lottery ticket, you don’t believe you will win, so why are you buying it?
Examples like these sort of pull my intuitions towards thinking no, it doesn’t make sense to speak of probabilities for certain events.
Sorry that talking about money lead to confusion. I guess the point I was making was the following. See my respond to mattnewport, i.e.:
Suppose you have a gamble Z with negative expectation with probability of a positive outcome 1-x, for a very small x. I claim that for small enough x, every one should take Z—despite the negative expectation.
What exactly does maximizing expected utility yield in these particular cases?
For one, I could be convinced not to take A (0.01 could be too risky) but I would never take B.
I feel that if maximization of expected utility involves averaging probabilities of outcomes weighted by payoffs, then it’s going to suffer from similar difficulties.
Wouw… Thank you for this charitable interpretation. I’ll try to respond.
(1) You don’t have to construe the gamble as some sort of coin flips. It could also be something like “the weather in Santa Clara, California in 20 September 2012 will be sunny”—i.e. a singular non-repeating event, in which case having 100 hundred people (as confused as me) will not help you.
(2) I’ve specifically said that if you have enough trials to converge to the expectation (i.e. the point about Weak Law of Large Numbers), then the point I’m making doesn’t hold.
(3) Besides, suppose you have a gamble Z with negative expectation with probability of a positive outcome 1-x, for a very small x. I claim that for small enough x, every one should take Z—despite the negative expectation.
What’s your x, sunshine? If 0.01 isn’t small enough, pick a suitably small x. Nick Bostrom in Pascal’s mugging picks 1 over quadrillion to demonstrate a very similar point. I picked 0.01 since I thought concrete values would demonstrate the point more clearly—I feel like they’ve been more confusing.
In fact, people take such gambles (with negative expectation but with high probability of winning) everyday.
They fly on airplanes and drive to work.
(4) Besides, even if we construe the gamble being repeated like a coin toss, I feel like with 0.99^99 = 0.37, you stand to lose 10M with probability 0.37 . I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t risk 10M with those kinds of odds. It helps to be precise when you can and not to go with a heuristic like “on average there should be 1 W in every 100 trial”…
Well, to clarify, here’s an example from here :
To illustrate, in a study conduced by Tversky and Kahneman (1974), a random number was generated by spinning a wheel. Participants were then asked to specify whether this random number was higher or lower than was the percentage of nations that are located in Africa—referred to as a comparative question. Finally, participants were instructed to estimate the percentage of nations that are located in Africa-an absolute question. Participants who had received a high random number were more inclined to overestimate the percentage of nations that are located in Africa. The anchor, as represented by the random number, biased their final estimate.
Here, the biased thinking isn’t a result of thinking in terms of abstract probabilities as opposed to concrete frequencies.
I’m sympathetic to the points G makes. It’s just that K&T’s results don’t always depend on information presented as probabilities.
Matt,
I see how Gigerenzer’s point is relevant to some of the biases such as the conjunction fallacy.
But what about other biases such as the anchoring bias?
Is there really a way to show that all fallacious reasoning in K&T’s experiments is due to presentation of information in terms of probabilities as opposed to frequencies?
Thanks.
I don’t know. I am hesitant.
I can think of instances in which someone has started talking about an anecdote and the other person wasn’t really responsive at all. (And, yeah, more than anything it was I who were telling the anecdote.) I guess it requires social savvy to pick which anecdote to tell.
I don’t think engaging someone meaningfully (i.e. “hooking”) in a conversation is as easy as making more statements as opposed to asking questions.
Conversation is more of an art than an exact science - ’tis true…
Anybody wants to call me so they can hear my totally irrelevant anecdote?
Thanks for the link! I will try to fight it :-).
From the link you give:
She told him she could go even more and showed him. He asked why she was so good at stretching and she explained she had been doing gymnastic when she was younger. So he asked her if she could do the other things, the cartwheel, the split, the bridge and she showed him.
Thanks for this—one more mystery solved.
Thanks for your summary.
The only place I differ from you is the cartwheel part. This behavior strikes me as genuinely insensitive and disrespectful but being disrespectful and insensitive doesn’t make one a murderer.
I’d like to believe that the prosecution has a case but for the life of me, I can’t see one.
One thing that struck me as weird is that Kercher’s family was ‘pleased’ with the verdict—do they really think that Knox and Sollecito took part in the murder? Why do they think that way? I’d like to know. Surely, the Kercher family must be reasonable people—so why are they pleased with the verdict?
The horrifying prospect is: do they know something I don’t? If so, I must search for it and learn it… :-(
The laws I know ban wearing the veil/turban (i mean the same thing by these two words) in government-related places—you can’t wear it in the work place if you are working for a government, can’t wear it in public universities, can’t wear it in the TBMM (the Turkish congress) etc. etc… You are free to wear it on the street or in the workplace if you are working for a private company. I may be mistaken—the ban covering the universities is the most famous and contentious.
Which text? I’ve not read the wikipedia entry—just linked to it, thinking it would repeat what I already know.
You mean Yvain’s story? It makes no sense. In 1920s, Turkey was largely being rebuilt after WW1 and the Turkish War of Independence. The legal system/constitution was being overhauled. The Arabic script was replaced with the Latin script. It is said that in one day, the entire country became illiterate—i.e. nobody understood the new alphabet at first.
With so much going on, I find it funny that Atatürk would pause and decree laws about prostitution. Consider me biased, but I think Atatürk had more urgent things to attend.