Mark Twain once quipped, regarding truth in journalism, that “there are lies, damned lies - and then there are statistics.” Interpretations vary, but a common take away is that people lie to others using fancy numbers. This is almost certainly true - but what is explored with tonight’s guest, statistician and professor William M. Briggs, is the tendency for people to deceive themselves by assigning undue authority to complex mathematical models and their practitioners - and not questioning the assumptions that inevitably go into those models in areas such as climate change and the recent COVID scare. In his books ‘Everything You Believe is Wrong’ and ‘Uncertainty’, Briggs examines many of these commonly held fallacies, and we discuss those findings along with his experience in the academic world to understand the implications it has for doing science in an increasingly non-scientific culture.
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with Adam Smith and General Lance
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-- References --
- How the Laws of Physics Lie, Cartwright (1983)
- The Intellectual Capacity Of Women, Stove (1995) - https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/17124/
- SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, Day (2015)
- Uncertainty: The Soul of Modeling, Probability & Statistics, Briggs (2016) - https://www.amazon.com/Uncertainty-Soul-Modeling-Probability-Statistics/dp/3319397559
- Everything You Believe Is Wrong, Briggs (2021) - https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Believe-Wrong-William-Briggs/dp/1087987156
- What Happened After Peter Thiel Paid 271 Students to Drop Out of College?, MSN (2024) - https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/02/24/2311221/what-happened-after-peter-thiel-paid-271-students-to-drop-out-of-college
- Elite overproduction - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
- Founder Fund - https://foundersfund.com/team/peter-thiel/
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