[mrpara]

Well, in the author's defense, they specifically stated that "Each assignment required a yes-no decision". I agree, though, that there really is no great lesson to be learned here since the real world doesn't work like that. The technical bit about channel capacity was honestly more interesting. It's a neat result (that should be fairly obvious to anyone who's worked with probabilities) with a not-so-great example to illustrate it.

[JoeAltmaier]

Agreed, "Yes/No" is in no way correlated with "50/50 chance".

Will I win the lottery? Yes/No. 50/50?

My favorite conflation is the "are we in a simulation?" argument. That's a yes/no also, and the ignorant conclusion is that its very likely we are. Without any statistics on the probability either way.

[TeMPOraL]

Also, Pascal's wager. The presented sides of the bet aren't equal, because on the one hand you have existence of a particular God, and on the other hand its non-existence, whereas in the real world, there's a whole space of possible Gods that people believe in that are not included in the wager.

[dredmorbius]

"Wheareas in the real world" is an interesting phrasing for that poylemma.