Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

In other news, the sky is blue.

I'm shocked that this is not obvious to everyone.

I'm not necessarily convinced statistics is the ultimate language of the brain. Like you, I imagine there are a number of legacy systems in the brain that coordinate in interesting ad-hoc ways.

What do you think I should read?

If I may riff on this rather unscientifically from my own anecdotal observations of how my own brain works:

I do not agree with TFAs assertion that "The feeling ultimately relies on the same statistical computations a computer would make".

I would agree, however, that one factor (of an undetermined number of factors) of decision making is something that roughly resembles statistical computation. The key difference is that our input data for these "computations" is absolute crap, and heavily influenced by any number of things, including confirmation bias, small sample size, selective memory, etc.

Let me draw an example of my many years and thousands of hours of play in a game that is dominated by statistics, pool (billiards):

Beginners at the game develop all sorts of incorrect assumptions about how likely a given shot is to succeed, informed by their insufficient sample size. "I made that shot three times in a row last night, why would I miss it this time?" This is, of course, the equivalent of "I hit 13 on the roulette wheel 3 times in a row last night, why would I miss it this time".

As you build experience, you start to get a more correct intuitive understanding of the actual statistical likelihood of a given shot going in, but it is still affected by selection bias, and a number of other factors.

The way (well, some) professional and semi-professional pool players have attempted to eliminate this bias is by actually taking notes on the types of shots they take and actually collecting the true statistics. Even then, after collecting this data for months/years, when confronted with a shot that, statistically, they are more likely to miss than to make, they will still assign an incorrect confidence level to their decision, particularly when they are in, say, the finals of a tournament with a big payday (adrenaline is bad for rational thought, though it can occasionally help you operate at the right edge of the bell curve of your "normal" ability, hence, poorly computed bias).

I don't think that we can boil the decision making process of the brain down to something as simple as a NN, or bayesian inference or whatever. I do, however, think that the brain does attempt a flawed statistical inference as one of many factors in making decisions.

(Note: i'm not anywhere near a professional pool player, nor will I ever be or desire to be, but I've brushed shoulders with some of the best in the world, so I believe I've got a modicum of observational authority on the matter. I also think it's a pretty good example of our brain trying and failing to properly infer the statistical likelihood of a given outcome; chance based gambling is another good one)

> Like you, I imagine there are a number of legacy systems in the brain that coordinate in interesting ad-hoc ways.

I'm sorry if I have missed something obvious, but where does haberman claim such a belief? As far as I can see they are just questioning the application of the scientific method and the strength of conclusions that can be drawn from the results.

You can't take any single act, where something goes wrong, and conclude that they obviously made the irrational choice.

Sometimes, you can make the correct decision and still have a bad outcome.

If someone offers you even money that they can roll double sixes on a pair of dice, the rational and logical decision is to take the bet. The rationality of the decision doesn't change if they happen to roll double sixes, it just means you got unlucky.