Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter

speaker
351 appearances 17 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2010 last heard Jan 2021

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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More or Less · Big numbers · 7 Jan 2011 podcast
And so this was really quite impressive. voice-verified
That's a one in 32 chance. voice-verified
That's a half times a half times a half five times in a row. voice-verified
That's the chance he would get that if he was just guessing. voice-verified
And the interesting thing about that is 1 in 32 is about 3%, and that's less than the classical threshold use, 5%, which is generally used to indicate what's called a statistically significant result. voice-verified
That's something that's really quite unlikely to have occurred just by chance alone. voice-verified
But why don't we believe he is psychic? voice-verified
Apparently that's a statistically significant result. voice-verified
Well, no, definitely not. voice-verified
And that's exactly the point. voice-verified
We have to go into what's called Bayesian reasoning. voice-verified
which means that we have to combine the evidence from the data that we've seen with what it might have been reasonable to believe about this octopus before we saw that evidence. voice-verified
And the point about that is that, I don't know about you, but my initial opinion, if I was told, is this octopus psychic or not, I would say, no, he's not. voice-verified
It's absolutely ridiculous. voice-verified
It's an absurd idea. voice-verified
And so even if you present me with considerable evidence, if my initial belief is that, well, there's no evidence at all, well, mathematically, nothing at all times quite a lot is still nothing at all. voice-verified
So it hasn't shifted my opinion one little bit. voice-verified
And I think that's what people would generally think. voice-verified
And so what it shows is that we can't interpret just one piece of selected evidence on its own. voice-verified
We have to combine it with our background knowledge and information in order to come to a final conclusion about the plausibility that he really is psychic. voice-verified
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