Lecture 2: Decision Making

Question 1

What is the major goal of science?

Answer 1

to organize human knowledge so it has utility

Question 2

What informs our beliefs and how we evaluate the kind of information we need

Answer 2

our beliefs are informed by our experiences; as we experience new things, we can create new/update existing beliefs

Question 3

How do we apply the scientific method in real life?

Answer 3

what is causing something, then investigating it

Question 4

What goes into human decision making

Answer 4

mental processes made of : experiences and memories, biases, logical reasoning skills, emotions

Question 5

explicit vs. tacit knowledge

Answer 5

explicit: readily articulated, stored, accessed
tacit: difficult to express or extract, and transfer to others

Question 6

system 1 vs. system 2 processing

Answer 6

system 1 is fast, intuitive, high capacity
system 2 is slow, reflective, low capacity

system 2 takes effort and conscious thought to engage

Question 7

How we used statistical inference to determine how UCR students feel about cats and dogs

Answer 7

We estimated using a sample of people from the classroom split into 2 groups

Question 8

What a
contingency table is and why we use it

Answer 8

• it shows the distribution of multivariate data
• can be used to assess correlations

Question 9

differences between the frequentist and Bayesian paradigms

Answer 9

frequentist:
- probability is the long-run frequency of a certain measurement or observation
- single fixed value

bayesian:
- probability expresses a degree of a belief in an event
- uses prior and posterior knowledge, probabilities are updated in light of new evidence

Question 10

Basic steps of bayesian inference in cats + dogs example

Answer 10

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