Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

350 | HOW THE MIND WORKSTo the Editors:In your editorial "Is Dole Too Old?" (April 1) your actuarial informationwas misleading. The average 72-year-old white man may suffer a 27percent risk of dying within five years, but more than health and gendermust be considered. Those still in the work force, as is Senator Bob Dole,have a much greater longevity. In addition, statistics show that greaterwealth correlates to a longer life. Taking these characteristics into consideration,the average 73-year-old (the age that Dole would be if he takesoffice as president) has a 12.7 percent chance of dying within four years.Yes, and what about the average seventy-three-year-old wealthy workingwhite male who hails from Kansas, doesn't smoke, and was strongenough to survive an artillery shell? An even more dramatic differencesurfaced during the murder trial of O.J. Simpson in 1995. The lawyerAlan Dershowitz, who was consulting for the defense, said on televisionthat among men who batter their wives, only one-tenth of one percent goon to murder them. In a letter to Nature, a statistician then pointed outthat among men who batter their wives and whose wives are then murderedby someone, more than half axe the murderers.Many probability theorists conclude that the probability of a singleevent cannot be computed; the whole business is meaningless. Singleeventprobabilities are "utter nonsense," said one mathematician. Theyshould be handled "by psychoanalysis, not probability theory," sniffedanother. It's not that people can believe anything they want about a singleevent. The statements that I am more likely to lose a fight againstMike Tyson than to win one, or that I am not likely to be abducted byaliens tonight, are not meaningless. But they are not mathematical statementsthat are precisely true or false, and people who question themhave not committed an elementary fallacy. Statements about singleevents can't be decided by a calculator; they have to be hashed out byweighing the evidence, evaluating the persuasiveness of arguments,recasting the statements to make them easier to evaluate, and all theother fallible processes by which mortal beings make inductive guessesabout an unknowable future.So even the ditziest performance in the Homo sapiens hall ofshame—saying that Linda is more likely to be a feminist banktellerthan a bankteller—is not a fallacy, according to many mathematicians.Since a single-event probability is mathematically meaningless, peopleare forced to make sense of the question as best they can. Gigeirenzersuggests that since frequencies are moot and people don't intuitively