Adam Kucharski

And he said, humans will go out of their way to making a judgment about something.

that will often you know the risk is you get the uncertainty where we're like very hazy like oh it's you know it's a definite possibility and actually in some cases like with you know if you've got an emerging threat and you've got experts you do actually want them to put a number on it you know even if there's uncertainty you want them to say i am 60 sure that this is the case and there's been a lot of nice work you know even around things like super forecasting where you

people make those predictions and you can go back and then look.

Because if people are well calibrated in their uncertainty, if you say you're 50% sure about a list of things, about 50% of the time those things should happen.

So about half the things on that list should occur.

So there are these situations where I think we can get better just about thinking about our own uncertainty.

And one of the things that I actually tried to do, I've tried to do in a lot of emerging threats, is even just writing down what you think is going to happen.

Because I think we're great at

you know the human mind at like kind of rationalizing oh yeah maybe I did think that and so yeah I did quite quite a lot of like where where you could state I actually think the vaccine is going to be pretty good or you know I think this and like this is where social media when it was maybe slightly less polarized was quite helpful because you could just put a post out and I think I was always very careful I didn't delete any of my tweets during COVID because I was like I actually want that record

And there were some I got wrong.

You know, I was in Singapore in Feb 2020 and their policy was don't wear a mask unless you have symptoms.

And I think I tweeted, I was like, yeah, that seems like a sensible policy.

That seems quite evidence-based.

And now we'd probably, you know, with some of the studies, not look back on that as being the best post.

But so, yes, I think it's almost that as well as overstated certainty, I think it's also holding ourselves to account, even if it's just, you know, privately about how confident we were and what played out.

So I think for me, it was the more I dug into this, the more I saw these other elements beyond kind of pure logic, pure observation coming in.

I mean, even if you look at

what was essentially a bit of a mathematical civil war in the late 19th century, where a lot of these ancient Greek theorems, things about the properties of triangles, started to break down because people started to draw shapes on spheres and other structures and come up with functions that these supposedly proven theorems didn't hold.

I think one of the reasons that was really controversial was there was this idea that there's a universal truth out there about the world.

And actually, in this situation, it kind of depended on what assumptions humans were making and what we were willing to kind of define.