Tyler Vigen
speaker
25 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2014
last heard Jun 2014
Tyler Vigen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
My name's Tyler Vegan.
I'm a student here at Harvard Law School.
What's kind of fun about it is it allows people to be their own scientist for a few minutes.
because they get to come up with a hypothesis like, maybe when there's more margarine in the house, it's more likely to cause divorce, or there's a link between some of the molecules and margarine or something.
And we get to think about that for a second, and then realize that we have no basis for that in reality, that there's just nothing that can confirm that for us, and we kind of can reject our own hypothesis outright.
I've seen a lot of headlines, especially sensationalist ones, where it might say scientists find connection between X and Y. And in a lot of those situations, there might be a correlation or even a mathematically insignificant correlation between two things.
But it's really important for us to be critical of whether that correlation exists or
whether we can show that there's actually statistical significance and whether there's a causal mechanism.
It's not that hard to find overlapping lines that kind of curve or vary together.
And just because two things vary together on a linear scale doesn't mean that they're actually correlated or that they're actually causing each other.
My name's Tyler Vegan.
I'm a student here at Harvard Law School.
What's kind of fun about it is it allows people to be their own scientist for a few minutes.
because they get to come up with a hypothesis like, maybe there is something, for example, the margarine and the divorce rate statistic.
Maybe when there's more margarine in the house, it's more likely to cause divorce, or there's a link between some of the molecules and margarine or something.
And we get to think about that for a second,
and then realize that we have no basis for that in reality, that there's just nothing that can confirm that for us, and we kind of can reject our own hypothesis outright.
And it's fun to be able to do that for a moment.
I've seen a lot of headlines, especially sensationalist ones, where it might say, scientists find connection between X and Y.
And in a lot of those situations, there might be a correlation or even a mathematically insignificant correlation between two things.
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