A balanced diet of machine learning education with Carrie Diaz Eaton Artwork

How do you know?

It’s ironic that in an era of big data, truth sometimes seems more elusive than ever. To make better choices about how to manage our lives, our work, and our environment, we need to use the best possible information to guide us. But even with great data, humans don’t always make great choices- we misinterpret, we oversimplify, we fail to see fallacies in logic or flaws in the data itself- and even our most rational examinations of the numbers are fundamentally human, shaped by culture, prior experience, and our internal biases.In this podcast, we explore the process of how data becomes information, information becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes belief- and how, in turn, belief shapes the way we take and interpret data. From young learners to practicing scientists, the ways we incorporate information into our worldview is affected by our experiences. We combine social and data science perspectives with the study of how humans learn, in order to examine not just what we know, but how we know it.

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How do you know?

A balanced diet of machine learning education with Carrie Diaz Eaton

September 09, 2022 • Christie Bahlai • Season 2 • Episode 1

Welcome back to season 2 of HDYK!

Today we're talking about how our positionality and the assumptions we make affect our approaches in science, but also thinking about how we turn that positionality into a strength by incorporating diverse viewpoints. We're starting this season with a great conversation with Dr. Carrie Diaz Eaton. Carrie is a mathematician and associate professor of digital and computational studies at Bates College.

She co-founded QUBES, which stands for Quantitative Undergraduate Biology, Education and Synthesis, a community devoted to open educational materials, to share amongst biology educators, to help bring quantitative concepts into the curriculum. She also chairs the committee for minority participation in mathematics at the Mathematical Association of America, her work centers inclusivity and engagement in math education.

A complete transcript of the episode is available here.