A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains

by Max Solomon Bennett

Suppose I asked you the following question: Tom W. is meek and keeps to himself. He likes soft music and wears glasses. Which profession is Tom W. more likely to be? 1) Librarian 2) Construction worker If you are like most people, you answered librarian. But this is wrong. Humans tend to ignore base rates—did you consider the base number of construction workers compared to librarians? There are probably one hundred times more construction workers than librarians. And because of this, even if 95 percent of librarians are meek and only 5 percent of construction workers are meek, there still will be far more meek construction workers than meek librarians. Thus, if Tom is meek, he is still more likely to be a construction worker than a librarian.