Talk
Physics Colloquium - Pay No Attention to the Model Behind the Curtain
When
· 4:00 PM MDT
Shown in the venue’s time zone (America/Denver), not yours.
Where
Boulder, CO
Tickets
No on-sale date recorded
This event came from a public calendar feed. Calendar feeds publish when a show happens, not when its tickets go on sale — so this is genuinely unknown rather than zero, and rather than “already on sale”.
What the source said
Presented by: Philip Stark, University of California Berkeley Abstract: Lord Rutherford famously said, "all science is either physics or stamp collecting." In a similar vein, all numerical modeling is either 'physics' or curve fitting. Many widely used models amount to an elaborate means of making up numbers—but once a number has been produced, it tends to be taken seriously and its source (the model) is rarely examined carefully. Those models generally have little connection to the real-world phenomena they purport to explain. Common steps in modeling to support policy decisions, such as putting disparate things on the same scale, may conflict with reality. Not all costs and benefits can be put on the same scale, not all uncertainties can be expressed as probabilities, and not all model parameters measure what they purport to measure. Pretending otherwise yields a "Type III error": answering the wrong question. These ideas are illustrated with examples from food safety, seismology, wind-turbine bird deaths, gender bias in academia, and climate policy. Host: Michael Ritzwoller