The Importance of Evidence

And Bayesian Inference

I continue to be preoccupied with the question of evidence — what constitutes evidence that actually supports the many, oh so many, opinions we throw out into the world either digitally or over a glass of wine with friends.  This link will take you to one of the more useful TED talks I have watched in some time. It touches on bayesian inference; but before you run screaming from your computer,the concepts explained here require no great statistical fluency and are remarkably useful. Why are anecdotes not evidence? Why are facts not enough? Why are even large collections of data not necessarily good evidence? How should we use experts without fully trusting them? Give this twenty minutes, you will know.

I love this Talk but object to the term post-truth world in the title. If the statement “we live in a post-truth world” is true, it logically refutes itself.  Say rather we live in a world where truth seems to be easily infected,weakened and and sometimes killed by the most dangerous plague of our times, the spread of cognitive dissonance.