Uncertainty Wednesday: A New Series

A while back I did a Tech Tuesday series which I thoroughly enjoyed writing. So I have decided to write a new series. This one will be on uncertainty. I was holding off on starting it as I have work to do on World After Capital but a discussion I had last week with our older son who is participating in a science program at the Museum of Natural History made me remember how excited I am about the subject of uncertainty.

Michael told me about how his class had collected oysters in the New York Harbor and were finding the mean and standard deviation of their samples. He understood how to compute these and also what they were about at an immediate level (average size and how much size varies). But he was not taught how to connect finding these numbers more profoundly to the progress of science and more generally to the creation of knowledge. Why do these “statistics” matter? What are we learning from them?

This is not at all uncommon. A lot of teaching about uncertainty, probability and statistics takes place in a vacuum. Students get the mechanics but not the meaning. I blame this on the fragmentation of knowledge into separate disciplines which are taught in isolation. I remember my own experience as being quite similar to our son’s. I learned some probability in high school, then had a statistics class as an undergraduate and a reasonably advanced econometrics course as a graduate. I got good grades in all of those. And yet much of it didn’t really click for me. I felt like I knew a fair bit about some individual trees but had no sense of the shape of the forest or how that forest fit into the rest of the land.

So the tall order I have set for myself is to write about uncertainty (including probability and statistics) in a way that provides context and makes these connections. As a venture investor, I deal with a lot of uncertainty every day. Hopefully as this series progresses I can convey both theoretical underpinnings and practical advice. Uncertainty is a key aspect of all of our lives.