HDYK Episode 1: Crunching the People 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?

HDYK Episode 1: Crunching the People

May 19, 2021 • Christie Bahlai

Welcome to How Do You Know, the podcast about exploring the numbers behind your beliefs. In this episode, Christie, Rebecca and Bridget, three plucky academics who found each other after finding their own ways to a northern corner of Ohio, introduce themselves and talk about how they ended up in the predicament of being people who crunch the people who crunch the numbers.

This podcast is produced with the generous support of the Mozilla Foundation and the National Science Foundation, and with input from community members from Mozilla, the Environmental Data Science Inclusion Network, and our colleagues and students at Kent State University. A special shout out to Kristen Dowling and Emily Loccisano for managing our digital presence and branding. Music featured in this episode is Tired Traveler On The Way To Home, by Andrew Codeman, and obtained from freemusicarchive.org under a CC-BY license.