Category: Book post

Objective ignorance is the idea that many things on which the future depends simply cannot be known.Objective ignorance is higher the longer into the future a prediction is. The future is messy and minor events can have large consequences. Many things are just unknowable.

The prosecutor’s fallacy and base rate fallacy are related ideas that both involve conditional probabilities. The prosecutor’s fallacy mixes up the probability that someone matches, given their innocence, with the probability that someone is innocent, given a match. You don’t care about the first probability – you already know there is a match.