Danielle Navarro recently wrote an amazing blog post about this phenomenon. It’s long and detailed so my favourite kind. It even shows the code.
And I realise now that other people are different from me. So the essence is: people may struggle with exact percentages but generally they can put things in order from more rare to more common, sometimes people really don’t know and they guess which gives a big difference when the true answer is very close to 0% or 100%, and finally… I don’t know, I forgot.
Or they don’t really understand percentages.
Danielle Navarro recently wrote an amazing blog post about this phenomenon. It’s long and detailed so my favourite kind. It even shows the code.
And I realise now that other people are different from me. So the essence is: people may struggle with exact percentages but generally they can put things in order from more rare to more common, sometimes people really don’t know and they guess which gives a big difference when the true answer is very close to 0% or 100%, and finally… I don’t know, I forgot.
https://blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2025-09-21_probability-judgement/
This is such an interesting read. Thank you for posting it.
Thanks for the read!
Trump recently claimed he has lowered drug prices by 1500%. That’s mathematically impossible.
That’s also from the worst brain on the planet. I’m up for shitting on the British any day of the week but I think that comparison is going too far.
30% of USAmericans voted for that worst brain and many (most?) of them lap up such bs from him unquestionably.
I was backing up your claim…
They being the Anglosphere IMO (am definitely counting fellow Australians).