Topic XIII. Orders of Understanding and the Parsable World
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Context for this filter:
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LEARNING GOALS
- B. CONCEPT ACQUISITION
- Effect Size: The size of the effect under examination. (e.g. how much being overweight affects health is the effect size of obesity on health).
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LEARNING GOALS
- C. CONCEPT APPLICATION
- Given a news article or other concrete example, correctly extract the effect size versus statistical significance of a causal factor, and explain how each affects the importance and usefulness of the results.
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EXAMPLES
- Exemplary Quotes
- “It turned out that the prices of these stocks was to first order being determined by the buy/sell orders of just a few major pension funds. After that, the second order effect was the automatic buying and selling from the index funds. In fact, the small investors that we thought were important barely affected the prices of these stocks at all—a third or fourth order effect at best.”
- Cautionary Quotes: Mistakes, Misconceptions, & Misunderstandings
- The commonest problem here is simply failing to consider orders of explanation, focusing on a small factor without remembering to consider its effect size.
LEARNING GOALS
- C. CONCEPT APPLICATION
- Identify multiple causes for a given effect or outcome and evaluate the relative importance of each with respect to different contexts and goals.
- Given a concrete example, identify good and bad examples of evaluating and using the relative importance of causal factors.
- Given a concrete example, recognize and critique poor decisions that result from considering only the ranking - and not the relative magnitude - of causal factors.
- (For instance, differentiate a case with one huge first order factor and many tiny ones from one involving several factors of comparable and large magnitude.)