Lecture by David Spiegelhalter OBE, FRS, University of Cambridge
Past experience and probability theory can be used to check the odds of your football team winning or judge the risks of activities such as riding motorcycles, taking illegal drugs, going into hospital or just living. Things get more difficult when we don’t fully understand what is going on, like early on in the swine flu epidemic, or when we are dealing with huge complexity, as in climate change. Then it can be helpful to admit what we don’t know. This lecture was hosted in the Department of Statistics by David J Spiegelhalter OBE, FRS (Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, University of Cambridge).