14.2 Wrap Up

An overview and conclusion of the course.

The Lesson in Context

The purpose of this lesson is to provide a wrap-up and review of the course. It gives the students a chance to synthesize different topics together and encourage them to try and apply them in the real world.

Relation to Other Lessons

Earlier Lessons

1.1 Introduction and When Is Science Relevant

This lesson harkens back to the utopia discussion from the first lesson. We'll look at the posters students made in the beginning and explore them in more detail using all of the tools we've developed over the course of the semester.

Takeaways

After this lesson, students should

Be able to develop new decision making processes that draw on material from multiple lessons.
Be able to synthesize multiple topics together so as to creatively recognize and apply them in the real world.
Feel optimistic about your ability to respond to and solve the challenges we've identified in this course.

We don't need "desiderata" when we already have a decision-making process.

Students often confuse "desiderata," or goals of decision-making processes, with the processes designed to achieve those desiderata. For example, asked to come up with desiderata, they suggest "use a representative sample," which is a process which achieves the desiderata, "allow representatives of all relevant groups to have a voice," "ensure that our solution will work for everybody," or "avoid systematic bias."

Humans are flawed and there's nothing we can do about it. We should just give up.

After spending a whole semester presenting ways human thinking and decision making can go wrong, it's easy to feel pessimistic. That's not what we want! In recognizing these problems, we've enabled ourselves to find solutions, so we should be optimistic!

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