Michael Stevens, a philosopher, writing at Aeon: Indeed, I conjecture, modern science arose in the 17th century, in the course of the so-called Scientific Revolution, precisely because it stumbled upon the extraordinary motivating power of ‘only empirical evidence counts’ – a story I tell in my book The Knowledge Machine (2020). For thousands of years, …
Tag Archives: data
What “evidence-based” thinking leaves out
A few loosely related items I was reading today… Zeynep Tufekci makes the case against election forecasts, and says this: This is where weather and electoral forecasts start to differ. For weather, we have fundamentals — advanced science on how atmospheric dynamics work — and years of detailed, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour data from a vast …
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Why we need journalists (good ones)
I’m in the middle of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. From Chapter 16: Nisbett and Borgida found that when they presented their students with a surprising statistical fact, the students managed to learn nothing at all. But when the students were surprised by individual cases – two nice people who had not helped – …
beyond the times 