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Uncertainty in Science -Stuart Firestein The most interesting thing I took away was thinking about our human perception of time and how it varies from person to person. It's crazy to think of all the factors that impact our perception of time by either slowing or speeding it up like for example pain certainly seems to slow it down. It was also very interesting thinking about life before clocks and how people coordinated on a large scale. There's no wonder that Stuart claims clockwork helped enabled the scientific revolution because it allowed for the mass coordination of people. Thinking about a typical modern-day, without a clock almost everything would be messed up. No alarm clock, no sense of meeting times, no idea when lunch or dinner occurs. A question I would've asked is how important is it for us to understand the mechanisms behind artificial intelligence?? Professor Goodman explains that a lot of AI we use gives us good recommendations without us really understanding the mechanisms behind the AI that made it generate these results. I think this is very powerful in helping us create new leads and breakthroughs but I think it can also get us in trouble. If we continue down this path enough without understanding specific AI results, it could create a future where we don't know exactly what we're building. This is specifically dangerous with AI because we need to constantly monitor its progress and make sure it goes down a path that we can control or a path that will in some way help humans. https://www.labxchange.org/library/pathway/lx-pathway:53ffe9d1-bc3b-4730-abb3-d95f5ab5f954/items/lx-pb:53ffe9d1-bc3b-4730-abb3-d95f5ab5f954:lx_simulation:9041b2ca?source=%2Flibrary%2Fclusters%2Flx-cluster%3AModernPrediction

Firestein : There is a lot of antiscientific thinking rampant in our population. Many refuse to believe scientists even when you provide data and numbers. How do you think this subset would react if you tell them ignorance is good for scientists? Wouldn't this further affirm their notion that scientific thinking is "subjective"?

I really like how Firestein doesn't always consider ignorance to be stupidity. Though most would believe ignorance precedes knowledge, in science, ignorance follows knowledge because often time an answer leads to more questions and assumptions which may mislead us off an entirely different path. Knowledge enables scientists to propose and pursue interesting questions that don't make sense and in no may should be considered stupidity but just refined critical thinking.