Thinking in probabilities is certainly posssible without formal training, and I'd argue most people do it, just cutting the corners and not actually doing the math.
Example calculation that I (and every other kid) did every day after shool:
- it takes 40 minutes on foot to get to home, buses go every 20 minutes on average, and get you there in 10 minutes, but sometimes they are late and sometimes some bus is broken and you will have to wait even 40 minutes
- it takes 20 minutes on foot to get to the next bus stop, so if you go on foot you may miss the bus if it goes when you're too far from both bus stops
Depending if there are people on the bus stop (so there was no bus recently), and if you see buses going the other way (so you will wait at most 20 minutes) - it makes less or more sense to wait instead of going on foot. But take into account that if you went out not directly after classes - the bus stop may be empty even if there were no buses recently.
It even makes you pay (with time or ticket money) for miscalculations :)
>Human perception and memory are often explained as optimal statistical inferences, informed by accurate prior probabilities. In contrast, cognitive judgments are usually
viewed as following error-prone heuristics, insensitive to priors. We examined the optimality of human cognition in a more realistic context than typical laboratory studies, asking people to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday phenomena such as human life spans and the box-office take of movies. Our results suggest that
everyday cognitive judgments follow the same optimal statistical principles as perception and memory, and reveal a close correspondence between people’s implicit probabilistic models and the statistics of the world.
Example calculation that I (and every other kid) did every day after shool:
- it takes 40 minutes on foot to get to home, buses go every 20 minutes on average, and get you there in 10 minutes, but sometimes they are late and sometimes some bus is broken and you will have to wait even 40 minutes
- it takes 20 minutes on foot to get to the next bus stop, so if you go on foot you may miss the bus if it goes when you're too far from both bus stops
Depending if there are people on the bus stop (so there was no bus recently), and if you see buses going the other way (so you will wait at most 20 minutes) - it makes less or more sense to wait instead of going on foot. But take into account that if you went out not directly after classes - the bus stop may be empty even if there were no buses recently.
It even makes you pay (with time or ticket money) for miscalculations :)