The Future of the Future

This week I watched Professor Goodman's interview of Ned Hall. What I found most interesting about the talk was Professor Goodman and Ned's conversation about rules and theories. From what I gleaned rules are more tailored to specific situations and do not involve concepts that can't be directly obs

I really enjoyed Professor Goodman and Professor Firestein's discussion regarding the importance of uncertainty and “ignorance” in science, as they consistently note that scientific discoveries rarely get at a universal truth and are instead stepping stones in letting us understand more about what w

I greatly enjoyed watching this chat with Stuart Firestein, professor of Columbia University who teaches not only the Introduction to Neuroscience but also a course called "Ignorance: What We Don't Know." I learned that the course is based on the idea that ignorance is not the opposite of knowledge,

I think something that surprised me was that there was a possibilty of being able to 3D print what is needed to make vaccines. In a world where labs are now creating 3D printed meat and food, being able to create vaccines in a mass-producable way opens up a whole new horizon. I think it's amazing th

After watching the Artificial Intelligence interview with Prof. Shneiderman (and watching some of his lecture at the Radcliffe Institute), one thing I was struck by was the attention to the importance of visual presentation methods for the success of various kinds of technology. Although it seems so

In the interview, Professor Goodman and Firestein discussed the memories of several senses, including olfactory memory and acoustic memory. I was wondering if there were any studies that actually compared the memory of all five senses – smell, touch, taste, vision, and hearing – in order to determin

When watching the interview with Stuart Firestein, the thing that surprised me the most was when Firestein said that throughout civilized human history, the most advanced technology at the time was always compared to the brain. I find that absolutely fascinating. Beyond the fact that the info is ext

Something that surprised me from the interview with Agustin Rayo was the point he made about how a lack of determinism imposed by quantum randomness or some other force doesn't necessarily equate to free will, as being governed by randomness doesn't incorporate any more individual agency than being

When watching the interview with Stuart Firestein, I would have liked to have asked him what he believes will be the future of and with brain-machine interfaces. It is something that really scares because of how easily we could screw up in the process and have horrible repercussions. Some things tha

Link to the Stuart Firestein conversation. I enjoyed the conversation of smelling the past and future very much. I know I smell things everyday that remind me of some kind of experience but don’t often consciously think about this phenomenon. It is also thought provoking that these memories really

I was especially interested in the intersection of philosophy and prediction because much of what we’ve learned about modern prediction falls within a very practical context. Prediction is often used to help in very practical ways in our everyday lives: informing clothing choices, our driving routes

The conversation regarding determinism and free will was super interesting to me. He relies a lot on the concept of life paths and learned behavior. One example that Agustin Rayo brought up that were interesting to me is the “Alyssa in 10 years” scenario. He said that it is not feasibly possible to

One thing that was particularly interesting from this interview was their discussion of linguistic contexts. Rayo was making the point that most human decisions are predictions of some sort, whether we are predicting how something will make someone feel, predicting what the best option is for oursel

I really enjoyed this week's video about AI safety! I found it interesting that Ben made the distinction between AI being framed as a partner and as a tool. I think it is super important that we maintain AI as a tool rather than a partner because using AI as a partner may lead to unpredictable resul

I would have analyzed the various videos on our group and decided which parts were more theory vs more data. For example, in the video I watched talked about mobile health and earthquake prediction, the information used to predict the Sendai earthquake was more data focused. The conversation snippet

I found one of the most interesting points that Professor Firestein mentioned during the talk was the fact that humans did not have a sense of time in the sense we do now until the invention of timepieces during the modern era. This perked my interest in the history of time; for example, did ancient

While it's not technically something I "learned", an idea presented in the interview with Stuart Firestein that I liked was the notion that science created ignorance. I like this idea because it's something I wouldn't really think about. No matter how far back you define the "start" of science, the

The first half of Professor Goodman’s conversation with Stuart Firestein centers on the idea of how to teach science in a way that honors how little scientists know about how the world works. I found this conversation exciting, especially because acknowledging and talking about scientific ignorance

After watching the interview with Professor Stuart Firstein it made me think about forms of uncertainty in science in a whole new way. I especially enjoyed the part of his interview where he discussed ignorance about the future and scientific uncertainty. In this part of the interview Professor Good

During the conversation between Prof. Goodman and Rayo, they honed in on the problems of public perceptions of prediction and, relatedly, prediction accuracy and trust. Prof. Rayo made a fascinating point about trusting predictions, arguing that people should often trust a prediction even if they ar

While listening to this interview with Professor Laibson, several intriguing facts about behavioral economics and how it has been used historically, how it is used today, and how it may be used in the future, stuck out to me. I think one of the most striking things is how recent the development of t

This week I listened to Professor Goodman's interview of Ned Hal about the intersection of psychology and prediction. One thing that I found really interesting about the interview was Ned's breakdown of what needs to happen in order for climate change to be properly dealt with. Professor Goodman had

One concept related to conceptualism that he has introduced is the "uncertainty funnel." The uncertainty funnel is a metaphor used to describe how uncertainty is often simplified and narrowed as it is communicated to the public. At the top of the funnel, there is a wide range of possible outcomes an

I learned about the existence of the International Atomic Energy Agency. As Professor Goodman and Lord Rees noted, the youth tend to be pretty pessimistic about the shape of things, so I was pleasantly surprised to find the wikipedia page for the IAEA doesn't have a controversies tab, and the critic

During April of 2023, in Harvard's GenEd 1112, we'll talk plenty about AI. In this post, I'll include a very recent NY Times series students can draw upon (especially "Part 2: How Does ChatGPT Really Work?"), and also a New Yorker piece from 2015 where Nick Bostrom, Oxford's notable philosopher of

There's a section of the interview with Stuart Firestein that discusses the issues with how people learn about science and science history throughout their primary and secondary education. While I think Firestein makes clear how he'd want people to learn about/understand science during these early

His class on ignorance sounds absolutely fascinating. As a non-physical science student, whose last signficant experience with the Chemistry, Biology, and Physics was in high school in a memor-intensive class, I found this class to be so important. As a high school student, I knew economics was deep

Link to the Stuart Firestein conversation. I found the discussion on how science is taught in schools very interesting. Specifically, that science classes before grad school is essentially learning what science already knows and memorizing it. Mr. Firestein expressed his worry that people that don’

I enjoyed Professor Firestein’s discussion of how cultural factors affect our understanding of time, especially the sense of progress that many people now believe is innate but is likely a condition of our current moment. This point arose from a conversation about the emotional memory and its connec

One of Firestein's most interesting points was his discussion of "mechanisms" across different fields. In fields like mechanical engineering, it's usually very easy to see why something works, while the "why" in chemistry and biology often takes years to discover. Firestein seems to imply around 29: