School of Public Policy 228 - Weighing the Evidence

What are the likely effects of proposed social policies? Should an environmental pollutant be considered a health risk? How can one manage to sensibly synthesize multiple strands of evidence of criminal wrongdoing, discrimination, or liability to reach a sound judgment? Human intuition is easily led astray when tasked with judging probabilistic and causal arguments at the heart of these and other such questions. In some cases, mental training may help us better avoid the pitfalls to careful reasoning under uncertainty. In others, simple adaptive heuristics lead us to better results than would have been obtained through attempts at ?rational? decision-making. We consider different ways that philosophers, scientists, and statisticians have sought to interpret probability and causation, the practical techniques that have emerged, and how they may be applied to problems in public policy and legal settings. Grappling with a number of interesting fallacies, puzzles, and paradoxes along the way, students will deepen their ability to critically examine competing claims about data, analyze and interpret evidence, and identify areas of genuine ambiguity. We also pay attention to the natural limitations imposed by a complex world and finite time and mental capacity, examining the pros and cons of common mental shortcuts.