I’d like anyone who was born on March 22nd to stand up.” Two students stand up. They link eyes from across the room, and smile. The room laughs. “Now… - David Franklin

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I’d like anyone who was born on March 22nd to stand up.” Two students stand up. They link eyes from across the room, and smile. The room laughs. “Now, anyone born on June 14th.” Another two stand up. The room laughs again. “Now, anyone born on August 2nd.” Two more: the class is laughing at each pair, and re-examining their original takes on how low the probability was likely to be. They are learning through experience about human fallibility with estimating probabilities, and at the same time learning something about their classmates. “How about December 21st?” This time, three students stand up. This gets a big laugh for two reasons: firstly, it is unexpected, and secondly, it helps to ram home the idea that in a class that size (there are about 3,000 pairs in a class of 80), there are likely to be “coincidences” everywhere.

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About David Franklin

David Franklin is an art historian with expertise in Italian Renaissance art, a curator, and a former art museum director.

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Additional quotes by David Franklin

It sounds like a lot of you are not too surprised if this 30% chance materialises,” Dan replies. “You take precautions against it. The rain, if it comes, doesn’t shock you, and you have your umbrella. So why was everyone so shocked about Trump?

For these ‘future leaders’ in the classroom, it is more important to understand the psychology of certainty. Often, we believe what we want to believe. Dan starts with an example of the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States. He asks the question: “Relative to what you expected to happen, how surprised were you when you learned that Trump had won the election?

In advance of the class, he asked students to fill in a quick survey in which he asked them to describe their own experiences with one of these three uses of statistics. He tells the students that he has read their answers, as well as their student profiles, and asks for volunteers to talk about what they wrote. Several hands go up, and he picks Juliana, a student from Brazil, interested in education. She starts to talk about a program she helped to run in Brazil which assessed whether improvements in teacher training had a causal effect on test scores. As she is talking, her words appear on the big screen, in big quotation marks, along with her photo. The class laughs, and as she looks up she realises she has become a celebrity.

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