An occasional post of insightful, funny, or outrageous quotes from Human Action.
A surgeon tells a patient who considers submitting himself to an operation that thirty out of every hundred undergoing such an operation die. If the patient asks whether this number of deaths is already full, he has misunderstood the sense of the doctor's statement. He has fallen prey to the error known as the "gambler's fallacy." Like the roulette player who concludes from a run of ten in succession that the probability of the next turn being black is now greater than it was before the run, he confuses case probability with class probability.
Human Action, chapter VI, part 4.
Can I make a request? Would you guys please add an e-mail/forwarding feature to your blog? I would love to be able to forward these posts to friends, who are sadly lacking in knowledge of economics and the Austrian school in particular.
Please, please, please?
Posted by: RickC | January 29, 2009 at 10:00 AM
I have another request - can there be an email address for suggestions of topics/issues to be discussed?
Posted by: Will | January 29, 2009 at 10:06 AM
Maybe Frederic can somehow find a way to do that.
For now, Rick, CUT & PASTE into your email!
Posted by: Dave Prychitko | January 29, 2009 at 10:43 AM
Err... copy & paste...
Posted by: Dave Prychitko | January 29, 2009 at 11:36 AM
Rick,
If you're reading on the web, get the permalink by clicking on the "permalink" link and then just do "file / send link" (in Firefox anyway) and you can email the exact entry with comments to anyone.
Posted by: Steve Horwitz | January 29, 2009 at 01:22 PM
Thanks guys.
Posted by: RickC | January 30, 2009 at 11:53 PM