What are you hoping that people will do with this information? Most of these folks will never run the TSA, so they can’t do much except gripe about being made to take their shoes off in airports. Even in the breast cancer example, the most that your average person would take away from the speech is “you’re supposed to multiply something by...something, and somehow the test might be wrong.” What advice are they supposed to give their friend? Most women with a scary-looking mammogram who hear their friend say, “You’re probably fine” are going to doubt whether the friend takes their health seriously.
The problem with supposedly practical applications of Bayes’ theorem is that you usually don’t have the data to do the math even if you know how, and there’s usually not much practical action you can take based on it anyway. It’s an interesting idea, and the people who like that sort of thing may want to learn more about it, but there’s no information in this lecture that would let them trace the idea (other than talking to you afterwards). But I gather this was not the kind of audience who goes home and googles Bayes’ theorem, so mentioning the name probably wouldn’t have done much.
In most of the cases where knowing about base rates would help us, we don’t actually know the base rate. If I know my child’s preschool teacher is being investigated for child abuse, is that strong evidence that she really abuses children? I suspect most preschool teachers do not abuse children, but that many are accused of it at some point in their careers, but I don’t know the rates of either. So I can’t really draw useful conclusions.
Thanks for your input. I’m not sure whether you are saying that it is a waste of time (both mine and theirs) to try to teach people about Bayesian inference, or whether there was a better way I could have explained it and made it relevant to them. If the latter, do you have any ideas as to how I could improve my treatment of the topic?
I’m not sure there’s a way to make it relevant to a previously uninterested audience in 5 minutes. I think your speech was well done for the constraints you had, but I don’t have ideas for how to make that topic work given the constraints.
I might have picked a simpler cognitive bias to talk about instead.
What are you hoping that people will do with this information? Most of these folks will never run the TSA, so they can’t do much except gripe about being made to take their shoes off in airports. Even in the breast cancer example, the most that your average person would take away from the speech is “you’re supposed to multiply something by...something, and somehow the test might be wrong.” What advice are they supposed to give their friend? Most women with a scary-looking mammogram who hear their friend say, “You’re probably fine” are going to doubt whether the friend takes their health seriously.
The problem with supposedly practical applications of Bayes’ theorem is that you usually don’t have the data to do the math even if you know how, and there’s usually not much practical action you can take based on it anyway. It’s an interesting idea, and the people who like that sort of thing may want to learn more about it, but there’s no information in this lecture that would let them trace the idea (other than talking to you afterwards). But I gather this was not the kind of audience who goes home and googles Bayes’ theorem, so mentioning the name probably wouldn’t have done much.
In most of the cases where knowing about base rates would help us, we don’t actually know the base rate. If I know my child’s preschool teacher is being investigated for child abuse, is that strong evidence that she really abuses children? I suspect most preschool teachers do not abuse children, but that many are accused of it at some point in their careers, but I don’t know the rates of either. So I can’t really draw useful conclusions.
Thanks for your input. I’m not sure whether you are saying that it is a waste of time (both mine and theirs) to try to teach people about Bayesian inference, or whether there was a better way I could have explained it and made it relevant to them. If the latter, do you have any ideas as to how I could improve my treatment of the topic?
I’m not sure there’s a way to make it relevant to a previously uninterested audience in 5 minutes. I think your speech was well done for the constraints you had, but I don’t have ideas for how to make that topic work given the constraints.
I might have picked a simpler cognitive bias to talk about instead.