Possible | Hannah Fry on AI, algorithms, and human nature
Reid Hoffman
Co-Founder, LinkedIn, Manas AI & Inflection AI. Author of Superagency. Investor at Greylock.
Whether you realize it or not, life is full of bets: On people. On outcomes. On what the future might look like.
We take a 70% chance of success and mentally treat it like a sure thing, until we get hit with the 30% chance of a negative outcome and feel blindsided.
This week on Possible, mathematician Hannah Fry frames the implications of this using an example from a cancer patient facing a decision:
Doctors told the patient that without further treatment, she had an 84% chance of living another ten years. With chemotherapy, radiation, and hormone therapy, her ten-year survival odds would be 88%. Statistically, the gain was marginal. But emotionally, it didn’t feel that way. Despite the probabilities she’d been presented with, the woman felt that she had to do the full treatment to live, while perhaps neglecting to weigh the toll that treatment would take on her quality of life. Like so many patients, she interpreted the decision as binary.
What sticks with Hannah about this is how poorly many systems are built to help people understand risk in a way that maps to their values. Hannah offered a better frame—one I’ve found myself returning to again and again: Don’t take a number and try to force it into a feeling. Start with the feeling you want to experience, and work backward to the number.
What risk are you actually willing to tolerate? What are you optimizing for? What outcome would you regret the least? These are the questions that matter when the stakes are real.
I’ve seen this play out in medicine. In business. In relationships. When you flatten complexity into false precision, you’re not protecting yourself from risk. You’re making yourself more vulnerable.
So, I agree with Hannah that we need to practice more probabilistic thinking. Once you start to navigate decisions by seeing a spectrum of possibilities—not a set of binary choices—you can start to build better systems.
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We discuss all this and more in the full episode with Hannah: https://link.chtbl.com/QNZmSn_u
YouTube: https://youtu.be/yDTexN57dWA
Transcript: https://www.possible.fm/podcasts/hannah/
You can subscribe to catch more episodes of Possible here: https://www.possible.fm/
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6dReid Hoffman
Sales Executive | Accessibility & Inclusion Advocate | Customer Experience Advisor | Business Messaging Enabler
6dLoved the idea 💡 she proposed: to start with the feeling and then apply numbers to it.
The link between probabilistic thinking and AI ethics was fascinating. Would love to hear more on that in future episodes. Reid Hoffman
Sharing My Journey That Helped Me Build Businesses and an Investment Portfolio
2wReid Hoffman "Appreciate this perspective, probability isn’t just math, it’s a mindset. Looking forward to the episode and how it connects data, decision-making, and the nuance we often overlook.