MU-6: Human Behavior and the Maths Connection
This blog, while part of the “MU” (Mathematical Universe) series, is far more narrow in scope: it’s about humans and their behavioral patterns. And the maths connection to all that, of course. Have you heard of Bayes Theorem? Probably not. Here’s what the theorem does: let’s say you’ve assigned a certain probability to the occurrence of some event (let’s call it the “original event”). Later, you learn of some new piece of information related to the above. By how much should you adjust your probability of the original event based on this new information? That’s the question that Bayes Theorem answers, via equations, of course. (We need such equations because the adjustment we should be making is very unintuitive). Kareem Amin makes the amusing point that the maths of Bayes Theorem explains why it is pointless to argue with fundamentalists : “By definition, fundamentalists have an initial confidence in their beliefs (or their hypotheses about certain aspects of the world) tha...