The infinite monkey cage (podcast)

I listened to quite a few episodes of The Infinite Monkey Cage and these are my favourites, as well as my thoughts on the topics discussed:

• Randomness
• What Don’t We Know?
• What Makes Science a Science?

The importance of understanding probability

I think one of the most important scientific concepts to understand is probability because it is so easy to make mistakes with. Even mathematicians go wrong with probability. So, maybe we shouldn’t expect to become probability experts, but I think the complexity of probability is precisely why we must aim to grasp a basic understanding of it. 

This is particularly important because we are exposed to probability figures on a daily basis, for example in the news, as so many people try to predict the future with mathematics. For instance, a newspaper said that when a women won the lottery twice in four months, there was a 1 in 17 trillion chance of it happening. However, this was the probability of this particular person buying the two winning tickets, not of anyone buying them. The probability of any person in America buying two winning lottery tickets in a four month period was actually 25%.

An understanding of probability can also be helpful at an arcade. For example, when playing a slot machine, if the probability of getting a jackpot is 1 in 10, people tend to assume that the probability of winning the next gamble increases if they’ve lost the last few gambles. However, this doesn’t work because each gamble is random; the probability is always 1 in 10, no matter what came before. This is called the gambler’s fallacy and it occurs because human brains are wired to spot patterns. This was an evolutionary advantage that helped us spot tigers in long grass, for example.

As well as this, I think that an understanding of probability can be helpful in understanding why we shouldn’t be scared of travelling by plane (although it’s bad for the environment) as it’s actually safer than travelling by car. For all of these reasons, I think probability is an incredibly important mathematical concept to get our heads round.

Will we ever know everything?

I don’t think we will ever know everything because that would mean the end of science. Science says that we should doubt what we think we know, which is why we have proven ourselves wrong about so many things since the field emerged. So, if we were to know everything, it would mean the end of all doubt, as well as the end of all curiosity. I would argue that scientific knowledge, without curiosity and questioning, becomes religion, at which point it is no longer science at all. So, as long as the scientific method is practiced, we won’t know everything for certain. 

Even if we did every experiment hundreds of times and the results appeared unequivocal, there is still room for doubt because conducting the perfect experiment is incredibly difficult, particularly in fields such as medicine. Therefore, I think it is unlikely that we will ever know everything with absolute certainty and be completely sure that there is nothing left to learn.

What makes a science a science?

I think evidence is at the core of science. The difference between a science and a non-science is in the approach used and how much it values evidence; this matters far more than what is being studied.

However, it’s important to recognise that the reality of science may not always fit our definition of it. Not every study is as robust as it would ideally be, but often we call it science in order to demonstrate that the information it presents is more grounded than just any theory. So, some science is technically more scientific than other science, but the most important thing is that scientists point out the flaws in each other’s experiments and don’t forget to pay attention to the studies which don’t  yield attention-grabbing results.