Adam Kucharski

But I think the way that I approached it is just to look at how people have thought about this in different fields.

And again, even going back to Lincoln and much earlier, there was this

this appeal of this certainty, this idea that there could be this universe truth.

And it's why a lot of fields ended up borrowing from mathematics.

You see it in the US Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

The original draft was, we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.

But Benjamin Franklin didn't like that because it sounded like they were kind of appealing to some divine authority.

And self-evident is just borrowed directly from maths.

It's just a given truth.

And

Unfortunately, it turned out a lot of these things about equality weren't self-evident.

But I think that story of how you think about these things, and even when we see in the legal world, a lot of it was originally derived from concepts around maths, around probability.

If you talk about some of these thresholds, preponderance of evidence, you're saying it's more likely than not, and you're kind of borrowing a lot of these kind of probability-based ideas.

And even in the world's kind of more experimental design, as that kind of developed, a lot of it was about...

I mean, actually, some of these early studies were almost trying to discount some of the influences of religion.

You're wanting to understand cause of effect in the world rather than just appealing to some other influence.

And then it, for lots of people, it became this question of how do you take the evidence you have and how do you link that to a conclusion that you want to make?

And where do you set the bar for that?

Do you try and get ever closer to certainty?