Probability Fallacies

NOTE: This course is included in the site-wide bundle which unlocks every course in the Academy.

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This course is an immediate follow-up to the lectures in "Reasoning with Probabilities", but the videos don't assume much in the way of background knowledge, so you can get a lot out of them without having watched any of those previous videos.

The focus of this course is on the various ways we make mistakes when reasoning about chance and probability.

What Will I Learn in This Course?

In this course you'll learn:

• how to think critically about the significance of coincidences and unlikely events
• how to think about the nature of randomness and its role in nature
• the basic elements of decision theory and how that can be used to think about the odds of success in gambling scenarios
• about the psychology of gambling, including cognitive biases like the Gambler's Fallacy and the Illusion of Control that help to explain seemingly irrational gambling behavior
• and more!

What Do I Get With This Course?

When you enroll in this course you get

• 13 video lectures, totaling almost 2 hours of viewing time
• Full transcripts for each of the lectures, embedded below the videos [coming soon]
• Discussion comments for each of the lectures, allowing you to ask and respond to questions and comments
• A pdf ebooks suitable for printing or viewing on a desktop computer or tablet device [coming soon]
• Quiz questions to help you review and test your understanding of the material [coming soon]

NOTE: While this course is substantial (almost 2 hours of video lectures), it is still incomplete. I have plans to add material on fallacies associated with regression, ignoring base rates, and other well known probabilistic fallacies.

But it's enough to make you a better critical thinker about chance and uncertainty than 90% of the people you will ever meet.

And you'll get access to all the new material when it becomes available.