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Image via Wikipedia It’s the beginning of the year and it seems like everyone is making predictions. How about this one: people with large brains are smarter than people with small brains. Don’t believe it? Neither do we. Find out why this prediction is hogwash and what makes for good and bad predictions.
This episode talks a bit about one of the first (and very crude) attempts to understand intelligence. The topic of intelligence is fascinating and here is a fascinating talk by Sir Ken Robinson about our need to redefine the concept of intelligence and how important creativity will be in our world.
Falsifiable
Karl Popper’s concept of falsifiability is an essential concept in science and important for anyone interested in critical thinking to understand. It boils down to this: it is essential for a prediction to be falsifiable: in other words, a good prediction can come out false.
- Bad Prediction/Hypothesis: "Something will happen to someone, somewhere at sometime this year". It’s bad because it is so vague it will most certainly come true no matter how it is interpreted.
- Good Prediction/Hypothesis: "Patients given XYZ drug will show a significant decrease on the Beck Depression Inventory over control subjects within 6 months from the beginning of treatment"
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I think this is true. Good predictions can be false and bad predictions can be good in the end.
when he made the meteor coment i actually felt that it was so specific that there is no way it could happen. so is it possible to be too specific on a prediction to make it false? i understand many people like specific predictions, but how do you test or measure it pre- event? the vauge is also hard to measure and test if not specific enough so how do you know what is a true prediction or what to believe if it is hard to test? is it just a wait and see what happens or is there ways to test these more specific or overly vauge predictions? because it seems that only ones that fall in between are testable to me so i am trying to understand the importance of predictions if many cant be tested. but that may be a lack on my understanding.
Some predictions can be false but then again they are just predictions. I think the time variable definitely has a big effect.
Actually nobody knows what is going to happen sometimes later in their lives but there are many predictions that are made in life of which some do not really happen.