Learner Posts and Discussions

I was interested in Prof. Gilbert’s discussion of how people internalize uncertainty and accuracy estimations. In his interview, he notes that individuals are typically unmotivated by statistics such as “a certain accuracy estimation improved by x%,” and are instead more impacted by behavior changes

Something that surprised me when I watched Professor Goodman’s conversation with Ned Hall was the discussion that they had about how we practically use models to promote understanding and make predictions. Dr. Hall brings up an example from his time as an undergraduate where he predicted different q

I watched the interview with philosopher and professor Agustín Rayo. I was most surprised by his strong assertion that physics does not speak to free will in the free will-determinism debate. This was part of his interesting perspective that determinism is just a very good predictor of the exercise

Most surprising bit of information: I was very fascinated by the research findings about corvids and how they could base their behavior on past trends in where their food has been placed and whether it has been moved, which may be similar to predictions, although humans are very distinct in the wa

Link: https://www.labxchange.org/library/pathway/lx-pathway:53ffe9d1-bc3b-4730-abb3-d95f5ab5f954/items/lx-pb:53ffe9d1-bc3b-4730-abb3-d95f5ab5f954:lx_simulation:5e3f229f?source=%2Flibrary%2Fclusters%2Flx-cluster%3AModernPrediction The most interesting concept brought up in the interview was the idea

One thing that surprised me from the Spiegelhalter interview was his emphasis on using colloquial terms to the public. He mentioned this in the context of COVID and discussed the importance of speaking in words that the public understands. He often uses the expected frequency idea that says, for exa

The most surprising bit of information I learned from this interview was that scientists would never ask patients who had their genes studied if they'd want to know their polygenic scores. Not only do these scientists take "refuge" (as De Vivo states) under the fact that they are just researchers, t

The most surprising piece of information I learned in the interview with Dan Kammen is that a number of oil companies, such as ExxonMobil, had been paying scientists to research on climate change only if the results had come out the way they wanted it to. I always knew the science on climate change

I was curious about what in the field of climate change according to him is the most important unknown? I understand that is not his direct field, but since he teaches a class on the unknown in science, it seems like there remains a lot of differing opinions regarding the key questions that remain

I would have loved to know if he has pushed for a similar course to "ignorance" in any other Universities? It seems like a really interesting class and I think it might be cool if it was accessible in more places.

This week I watched the interview with philosopher Ned Hall and found the conversation between him and Professor Goodman absolutely amazing--I am very astonished by philosophy and glad to see in what ways it relates to what we have been discussing in class. What partially shocked me during the inter

Find the interview here. I was surprised to hear Ned Hall referring to predictive systems as a patch of truth. I am skeptical about this framing which I will get into shortly. As a preliminary aside, Newton thought some wacky things about what space is, and what forces are. This led Hume and Berkely

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

For this week's video, I was quite thrilled to listen to the interview between Professor Goodman and Ned Hall on the philosophy of prediction. I really enjoyed learning further about the idea related to the mist and how we can look back in time, in our present and kind of in the future, however, it

Based on the discussion with Spieghalter, I found three main examples that give a good representation of the "theory to data" spectrum. On the far left of the spectrum of "pure theory", Cromwell's Law is a good representation of a pure theory. Cromwell's Law states that when dealing with probabilit

Something that surprised me in the conversation that Prof. Goodman had with Susan Murphy and Brendan Meade was the discussion of how humanity’s access to vast quantities of data and unparalleled computing power has changed the way “science” is done. It was fascinating to me how Dr. Meade described h

I was very surprised at the idea of Cromwell's Law. More specifically, at the implication that Cromwell's Law suggests. Cromwell's Law tells us that we should always assign a certain probability for an unknown variable/outcome/etc. The implication of this law is that humans can never be 100% accurat

https://www.labxchange.org/library/pathway/lx-pathway:53ffe9d1-bc3b-4730-abb3-d95f5ab5f954/items/lx-pb:53ffe9d1-bc3b-4730-abb3-d95f5ab5f954:lx_simulation:5e3f229f?source=%2Flibrary%2Fclusters%2Flx-cluster%3AModernPrediction I was most surprised when Professor Gilbert discussed that being able to p

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 scienti

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. Kno

What I found most surprising from the conversation between Prof. Goodman, Prof. Rayo, Cassandra, and Elizabeth was their discussion about the relationship between prediction, morality, and free will. I had never considered that if someone's actions can be predicted with complete certainty and accura

This was an incredibly interesting interview to me because it felt like we received two contrasting perspectives on how to think about the future. On the one hand, Agustin Rayo represented a very philosophical perspective, Professor Goodman provided one rooted more firmly in science. It was a very i

The most surprising piece of information I learned from the interview between Professor Goodman and Dan Gilbert was the categories of human belief and how these affect prediction. It was very fascinating to hear about the two different categories of human belief in regards to prediction, the first;

https://www.labxchange.org/library/pathway/lx-pathway:53ffe9d1-bc3b-4730-abb3-d95f5ab5f954/items/lx-pb:53ffe9d1-bc3b-4730-abb3-d95f5ab5f954:lx_simulation:5e3f229f?source=%2Flibrary%2Fclusters%2Flx-cluster%3AModernPrediction I thought the most interesting thing that Dan Gilbert mentioned is how huma

Reflections on Population Genetics with Immaculata de Vivo and Peter Kraft It was really interesting to see how in genetics and risk factor research, the consensus for a causational effect is not necessarily always the most wanted approach - sometimes correlational factors are enough to help treat

I found the discussion with Sir David Spiegelhalter very interesting. One surprising thing that I learned from this conversation is that the idea of evaluating and refining predictive systems through empirical data is a relatively new concept in the history of science. It was mentioned that in the p

Most surprising bit of information: I found the discussion of nuclear power to be surprising and enlightening. The conversation explained how it is very important to ensure that we derive our energy from a variety of sources. In this way, we can prevent larger failures because even if one source fa

I found the attribution model that was discussed in the context of determining the economic impact of the Northwest Pacific bark beetle on tree stands to be very interesting to learn about. Initially, I thought the process of finding out the economic impact would be easy. However, when combined with

Firestein had some interesting points with regards to how far off in the future some sciences await to observe certain phenomena. As an example, chemists usually don't have to wait long to see a type of decay compared to astrophysicists who in principle have to wait millions of years to see galaxy c

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 pa