Skepticism, Misinformation & Heretical Problem Solving

Dr Linda McIver is Founder and Executive Director at the Australian Data Science Education Institute, and author of Raising Heretics: Teaching Kids to Change the World. In this Episode, Linda describes her early interest in the science of biology, and her migration to a degree in Computer Science at Monash University which would ultimately be the focus for her PhD and wherein she would explore the development of a Genuinely Readable And Intuitive [programming] Language (GRAIL). Linda describes the ways in which gender biases influence students’ attitudes towards and exposure to STEM concepts and skills. We discuss Raising Heretics and why scepticism is so important for practising and teaching data science, and Linda points out that there are no definitively right or wrong answers in the real world, and instead we should focus on evaluating methodologies. Linda argues that we should be constantly challenging orthodoxy and gives a recent example from during the COVID-19 pandemic of false orthodoxy. Linda describes what kids are doing in schools with data science, from Year 11’s doing cancer research, sleep science, neuroscience, astrophysics, and wildlife monitoring to 5 year-olds doing data science projects in their community and analysing the results. We discuss the ascendence and pervasiveness of data science as a paradigm for understanding the world, and the epistemic issues facing the data science industry. We discuss data literacy, the failure of our education system to prepare Australians to be able to make sense of the information that we are now assaulted with daily. Finally, we expore the phenomena of misinformation, some characteristics of how it occurs, how it spreads, and how we can recognise it. https://adsei.org/ https://adsei.org/raising-heretics-how-data-science-education-can-change-the-world/ https://seerdata.ai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.