In the Fall of 2020, my colleague, Prof. Immaculata De Vivo of the Harvard School of Public Health, and I wrote an essay about the public perception of risk and uncertainty, especially with regard to COVID-19. In this post, we are gathering comments from students in the Spring 2021 edition of "GenEd 1112: The Past and Present of the Future," an undergraduate course I teach at Harvard. Students were asked to read the essay, and then comment here on which part(s) of the discussion they expect would be most illuminating for non-quantitatively-inclined readers --and/or to suggest another framing of the issues discussed that would be more effective.
As a non-quantitatively inclined reader myself, there are a couple of aspects of this impactful article that most clearly break down the reality of risk and uncertainty as it relates to the coronavirus pandemic. First, the distinction between the four high/low-risk and high/low-uncertainty categories earlier on in the article is helpful. Even if the reader is fuzzier on the exact numbers, they can easily conceptualize the relative risk and uncertainty of the common sense examples for each category. Following this discussion with the implication that the pandemic lies closer to space missions on the uncertainty spectrum, but closer to lying on the couch on the risk spectrum, makes the argument easy to follow. An additional strength is framing data as "prior observations." Like the previous example, this part of the discussion relates the quantitative to something non-quantitative that is perhaps recognizable to a wider audience. Finally, the explanation of uncertainty as "how well we know the odds" is a concise but effective way to drive home a key point from this class, that just because there is uncertainty does not mean that scientists don't know what is going on.