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Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Many people confuse the statement “almost all terrorists are Moslems” with “almost all Moslems are terrorists.” Assume that the first statement is true, that 99 percent of terrorists are Moslems. This would mean that only about .001 percent of Moslems are terrorists, since there are more than one billion Moslems and only, say, ten thousand terrorists, one in a hundred thousand. So the logical mistake makes you (unconsciously) overestimate the odds of a randomly drawn individual Moslem person (between the age of, say, fifteen and fifty) being a terrorist by close to fifty thousand times! [...]Our inferential machinery, that which we use in daily life, is not made for a complicated environment in which a statement changes markedly when its wording is slightly modified. Consider that in a primitive environment there is no consequential difference between the statements "most killers are wild animals" and "most wild animals are killers". There is an error here, but it is almost inconsequential. Our statistical intuitions have not evolved for a habitat in which these subtleties can make a big difference.”

Quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a renowned author, scholar, and thinker whose unique perspective and profound insights have had a wide-reaching impact in fields such as finance, statistics, and philosophy. He is best known for his books 'The Black Swan' and 'Fooled by Randomness', which have explored the nature of uncertainty, risk, and probability theory. more

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