Awesome line of thinking, and absolutely believable that most people don’t think numerically very well.
However, it’s also believable that there’s an equilibrium effect here. BECAUSE this is so unusual, and there’s no particular reason to think this boy is better at estimating the risk of wolves than the median resident, it’s easy to just ignore them. This is especially true when it’s a hassle to check for wolves and they’ve never needed to before.
If the boy were socially smart, he’d have separated the warning into two parts, each with justificatin: “There’s a 5% chance a wolf is here” and “5% is risky enough that you should do something about it”. And here’s how to check my reasoning.
Since villagers aren’t homogeneous, the boy just needs to convince a few people with status on the right dimensions, who need to convince those with status generally, who will convince everyone else. That’s pretty tenuous, so a lot of villages get eaten. Humans are, indeed, dumb.
Awesome line of thinking, and absolutely believable that most people don’t think numerically very well.
However, it’s also believable that there’s an equilibrium effect here. BECAUSE this is so unusual, and there’s no particular reason to think this boy is better at estimating the risk of wolves than the median resident, it’s easy to just ignore them. This is especially true when it’s a hassle to check for wolves and they’ve never needed to before.
If the boy were socially smart, he’d have separated the warning into two parts, each with justificatin: “There’s a 5% chance a wolf is here” and “5% is risky enough that you should do something about it”. And here’s how to check my reasoning.
Since villagers aren’t homogeneous, the boy just needs to convince a few people with status on the right dimensions, who need to convince those with status generally, who will convince everyone else. That’s pretty tenuous, so a lot of villages get eaten. Humans are, indeed, dumb.