The brain has conflicting goals: to provide you with information, and to reduce your anxiety about the worrying outcome. If you wanted Clinton to win… - David Franklin

The students are asked to rate their level of surprise on a five-point scale from ‘not surprised at all’ to ‘beyond shock’. Many describe feelings of total shock and numbness: a large majority indicate some level of surprise. He asks them: “Why were you surprised?

The first key idea is that when you have a challenge for which measuring progress is hard, the ability to adapt is just as important as the ability to plan.

In Dan’s case, the interest in policymaking is so central to the students’ presence at Harvard that it would be foolish to run a statistics course that did not acknowledge it. He goes as far as to build this into the purpose of the course: as we heard earlier, his purpose is “not just to maximise learning about statistics, but also to maximise learning of the skills that will be useful to have out there in the world.