I would have asked Dan Gilbert if he thinks that humanity (as in regular people, not just scientists and statisticians) better conceptualizes uncertainty now than we would have thousands of years ago. I would ask this question because looking back to the early divination systems we learned about at the beginning of the course, I wonder if people would only take these predictions as “it will probably happen”, like we do with the weather forecasts. On the other hand, one might think these people took these predictions as “it will certainly happen” and they would be troubled if they did not work out. I think it would be interesting to know how people felt about the uncertainty of these ancient prediction methods at the time, since I agree with Gilbert that people likely checked their prediction’s accuracy even in those times.
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