Why are we so bad at assessing probabilities?

Human beings are terrible, on the whole, at working out how likely it is that something will occur. We are prone to describe things as miraculous or beyond any chance occurrence when in fact they are statistically quite likely. Why is this? Michael Shermer gives an evolutionary account of what he labels 'folk numeracy' i.e. 'our natural tendency to misperceive and miscalculate probabilities' in his short article 'Why our brains do not intuitively grasp probabilities' His answer is that we dwell in Middle Land - we have evolved to deal with short term, close-by phenomena, and often miss the bigger picture as a result. But it is not obvious that this answers the problem: we'd be much better adapted to our environments if we were intuitively good at assessing probablity and risk...

Comments

[Aiya-Oba]

Very true,but humans do not just 'dwell in middle land,' every material being, is by nature a unit of the middle land (Equator) of Spacetime-Continuum.-Aiya-Oba (Discoverer):
Principle Of Included Middle.

[Geert Arys]

Just my 2 bit:
Is it possible we, as living beings, are bad in probability not because of some sort of scale problem (statistics dont mind scale imho), but because of the necessity to avoid risk?
In our need to survive, we should take absolutely no uncessary risks, because death (or in many cases injury) is quite irreversible.
For instance, I would absolutely go on a far-away holliday if one tells me there is a 1-on-a-thousand chance of a meteor impact on my house in the coming week.
Thus, we focus hard on the smaller chances to avoid or at least to cover for those smaller chances.
Sometimes, I wonder, if this does work the other way around too: lotteries offer such great reward we are willing to take an average loss...