In the Fall of 2020, my colleague, Prof. Immaculata De Vivo of the Harvard School of Public Health, and I wrote an essay about the public perception of risk and uncertainty, especially with regard to COVID-19. In this post, we are gathering comments from students in the Spring 2021 edition of "GenEd 1112: The Past and Present of the Future," an undergraduate course I teach at Harvard. Students were asked to read the essay, and then comment here on which part(s) of the discussion they expect would be most illuminating for non-quantitatively-inclined readers --and/or to suggest another framing of the issues discussed that would be more effective.
I thought most of the article was geared well to non-quantitatively-geared readers. Throughout, it uses examples, never getting too theoretical without concrete, real-world examples. The movie reference was particularly helpful, although the article left me on a cliff hanger because I don't know whether or not the guy survived Russian Roulette or not (and I didn't click on the link because the movie sounds like it has some upsetting themes, so I didn't want to read the full plot). The one example that I think would be a bit hard to follow if you were not used to quantitative thinking was the Covid one. Since Covid is so recent, it makes it hard to look back on in the ways that I could with the other examples, and my mind got bogged down with so many connotations of Covid risk that it was hard to focus on learning the content. However, overall, I thought the article did a good job of providing information to a non-quantitatively-geared audience.