Adam Kucharski

Even in this supposedly pure, pure subjects, there's still these debates around, well, it kind of depends on which one you want to pick, and that will change the answer.

I think even in science, there's a lot of these situations where we can accumulate the evidence, but then you have disagreement about where you set the threshold.

I mean, this kind of 5% cutoff has become very popular, this sort of p-value, or the chance that you'd get a result that extreme if there was nothing going on.

or your null hypothesis was wrong.

But that was kind of arbitrary.

I mean, it was partly picked just for convenience that this was, you know, a hundred years ago, the calculation was just a bit easier.

They picked a value, one official did a lot of this work, just easier to pick a value around 0.05.

And others who were more pragmatic, you know, working in business on something and thinking, well, actually the evidence is a bit weaker, but that's still useful to it.

So there's this kind of human

balancing act and you know we saw again things like legal cases where how much you value different types of errors depends a lot on the individuals i mean one of the um

examples that i found fascinating in the book was einstein when he moved to the u.s got very angry about peer review because he sent something to send something to a journal and it came back it's like oh we've got another opinion on it and he was like whoa whoa whoa like why haven't you just accepted accepted my work and actually max max plank who published some of his like amazing early papers plank made that point that actually i would rather kind of publish a few things that are a

than miss a really important idea so for him his threshold was like i want to set the threshold low admittedly mainly amongst kind of physicists he knew because i don't want to set it too high and miss a good idea

And I think we all have this kind of, that's where the art, I think, creeps in, that kind of subjectivity in not just the evidence.

I think for me, the real difference with something like proof is it's not just generating data.

It's how that data interacts with the world and the decisions we make.

And I think that's where things get really interesting.

It's like, where do we actually set the bar for evidence?

And then both to convince ourselves, but then go out and convince others too.

Thanks.

Great to talk.