Learner Posts and Discussions

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 scienc

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

2. One question I would ask Stuart Firestein is if scientific progress would eventually slow down. One would think that eventually society will gain such a high level of understanding of science that

I did not know predicting earthquakes is one of the hardest problems in science and specifically where, how large, and when they are expected to happen. I thought a lot of resources where devoted to t

I am personally fascinated by behavioral economics and the topic of nudges in particular. Nudges are when an outside actor changes how an individual interacts with a choice by playing on their subcons

When watching Meade and Murphy's interview , one of the things that stood out to me was that Meade said that the math we use might simply be "outdated," or fulfilled most of its potential, meaning we

The most surprising thing I heard from Brendan Meade was that over 2 billion people live within 250 Kilometers of an earthquake fault. Normally I think of only a small margin of the population being

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 y

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 a

Image: Chinese poster from the 1980s promoting science. Caption translates to "love science, learn science, use science". I loved hearing about how Prof Firestein came to create a course called “Ignor

The Firestein interview addressed science education and made me wonder: why do most instructors place so much emphasis on what people know than what questions they have? Is science education re

Personally, the main takeaway from this course apart from appreciating and applying the core framework (the one where inputs, prediction, and evaluation are all mentioned) is the role of theory in our

Although it is highly unlikely that we will ever "know everything," is there even a niche subject where we can possibly eliminate uncertainty? Also, more specific to Professor Firestein's field of res

After the interview with Stuart Firestein, I am left with several pressing questions I'd be interested in asking to keep the conversation going. First, I appreciated the discussion about the differenc

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

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 th

In his interview , Stuart Firestein talks about his course called Ignorance at Columbia. I thought that this was an interesting title for the course because it emphasized that we as humans don’t know

1. The most surprising thing I heard from the Stuart Firestein interview was that in science revision is victory. It is surprising to hear him say that science is not completely true, and that it can

I thought that the whole idea behind the class at the start was really interesting, especially because of his description of how scientists actually interact. The idea that they just go to a bar (or w

In the interview with Professor Firestein , I thought his explanation that since science is iterative, revision is a victory. When thinking about the great scientific discoveries, curiosity is what l