Rationality is not about learning facts, it’s about recognizing which facts are relevant.

There are many ways of knowing our world, and to be “educated” in the 21st Century involves being conversant with at least the most “valuable” methods of knowledge.

At one time, some century or centuries ago, that would have included the three big ones: reading, writing, and arithmetic…with study of the bible (western civs) often an important 4th pillar of being educated. What would we put on our “must-haves” list today?

We often hear “critical thinking” as being at, or near, the top of such a list today. But what does “critical thinking” consist of? Perhaps aggregating, collating, curating, and analyzing data would be important components, as well as the ability to identify salient algorithms, including the fundamentals of logic.

At one time “Logic” was a college-level course heavily based on teachings of the ancient Greeks and subsequent civilizations. Perhaps it still is, but logic today is an expanded field, and critical to any “critical thinking” curricula.

Algorithms also have a history, deriving their name from  Muhammad ibn Mūsa al-Khwarizmī. And critical thinking today would involve the study of statistics, and especially the laws of probability, both fundamentally important when it comes time to analyze data.

Probability is deeply woven into our culture, from ever more complex sports statistics to measures of safety, and much more. How should we define when a “self-driving car” is safe to ride in? We need a populace deeply aware of what it actually means when we say a vaccine is 95% effective, and…

An NTSB study found the odds of dying on a commercial flight due to an accident or crash is one in 29.4 million

As we know, for some people, when they see “odds”, as with plane crashes, they focus on the “one” number, thinking “somebody is crashing, and it could be me”. Which is true, but not helpful. To be educated today means knowing that it’s the other number that’s important, the near 30 Million chances of being safe. Lotteries would go out of business if people really understood probability, as would at least some casinos.

Kudos to Kris, here’s a YouTube introduction to understanding Bayes Theorem.

But probability is so much more, it’s a way of surviving and being productive in a world of way TMI. It’s a foundation of employability too, and ever more so, as we teach machines how to learn. We want to have at least some idea of “what and how” machines are learning/ thinking. And we want basic data analysis capabilities, for which understanding probability can be enabling.