Wikipedia defines common sense as “knowledge, judgement, and taste which is more or less universal and which is held more or less without reflection or argument”
Try to avoid using this topic to express niche or unpopular opinions (they’re a dime a dozen) but instead consider provable intuitive facts.
The gambler’s fallacy is pretty easy to get, as is the Monty Hall problem if you restate the question as having 100 doors instead of 3. But for the life of me I don’t think I’ll ever have an intuitive understanding of the birthday problem. That one just boggles my mind constantly.
Lemme try my favorite way to explain the birthday problem without getting too mathy:
If you take 23 people, that’s 253 pairs of people to compare (23 people x22 others to pair them with/2 people per pair). That’s a lot of pairs to check and get only unique answers
Really? The birthday problem is a super simple multiplication, you can do it on paper. The only thing you really need to understand is the inversion of probability (
P(A) = 1 - P(not A)).The Monty hall problem… I’ve understood it at times, but every time I come back to it I have to figure it out again, usually with help. That shit is unintuitive.
The birthday problem is super easy to understand with puzzles! For example, how does laying out the edges increase the likelihood of a random piece to fit.