David Spiegelhalter Interview

I believe one memorable moment from the interview was when David Spiegelhalter truly broke down the process of a statistical analysis. Rather than simply take the data and analyze it, he suggests that a statistician spend more time planning out the analysis in order to avoid potential biases. As a statistics concentrator, I have focused a lot on the actual statistical analyses but have not largely focused on human biases that may bleed through analyses despite their high levels of sophistication. The reason that this was so memorable for me was that it opened my eyes to how personal biases could impact a prediction I had previously considered quantitative only.

I believe that this interview is important because human biases related to risk has been an area of study that has in recent years received an Increasing amount of attention. What is interesting is that as our statistical and mathematical models continue to be developed, we are able to quantify risk, which in turn allows us to study risk and public perception of risk in more abstract ways. For example, we were able to see large variations in the public's perception of risk during the pandemic. These events are rather telling in how we as people view and quantify risk. As we are beginning to see, probability in and of itself is an not Intuitive, so people do not necessarily have strong gut reactions In assessing risk.