Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Intuition and Bad Mathematics

One would hope that the justice system is one aspect of everyday life based firmly on reason rather than intuition. However, the article below investigates how court judgements may be flawed if they are based on a weak grasp of statistics. Since scientific and forensic evidence has to be presented in terms of statistics, this does lead to a rather worrying state of affairs and means that the interpretation of expert opinion is vitally important in court judgements.

2 comments:

Andrew said...

Great idea for ToK Maths - and a fantastic website thanks! I have written some more on this topic, and have linked to your site:

http://ibmathsresources.com/2013/05/03/amanda-knox-and-bad-maths-in-courts/

Mike Smith said...

Hi Andrew
Thanks for the link. You've put together a really excellent site. I hope you don't mind me using your stuff in my lessons as well. Mike