Probability as a Mental Model is Bullshit
The idea is simple: probabilities don’t make any sense as tools for explaining the brain, they make sense as tools for describing what is literally possible. Describing what is possible and what is likely in the physical universe is awesome, I’m all for it. It’s cool that we can understand particle physics which may or may not bottom-out at pure (weighted) randomness or that we can get good estimates for how late trains are going to be before they even head-out because of our estimation of the situation.
However, people do not think in terms of events this way. People tend to consider a few narratively likely events and then make distinctions between them. Here “narratively likely” means that these events may or may not be realistically likely given the current information, but the agent feels like they are possibilities that require explaining either for internal coherency or social cohesion. Consider a woman who is about to confess her love for someone: there are two options to be explained, does her crush like her back or not? Of course, that’s not true. There’s a lot of spectrum between “yes” and “no” and there are dimensions that are entirely orthogonal: It turns out Mr. Crush has such low self-esteem he simply doesn’t take this seriously and the moment is gone, Ms. Lover doesn’t push further.
In order to make probabilities work for explaining mental models we’ve made mental models very funny. We’ve made them highly definitive where the brain is fuzzy. We’ve made them “instantaneous” instead of having the natural temporal thickness with which humans perceive events: the 2020 election went on and on, did it not?
