[MUSIC] My name is Seth Frey. I'm a professor at UC Davis in the Department of Communication. My training is in a mix of cognitive science and computational social science. And we're going to be talking about when to take risks. Before we dive into that, we gotta motivate a little bit. Let's ask what can computational social science teach? It can teach you a bunch of facts about human society. It can also teach you how to think good. And you're going to get a lot of both of those. I'm going to focus more on the second. Why? There's this dirty secret. This is terrifying, actually. Pretty much half of what we know in social science is wrong, and we don't know which half. We know this, we're discovering this, especially recently because of the computational revolution in social science has brought replication. Taking something that someone else found and just doing it a second time, that used to be a year project, a two-year project. Now, it's the click of a button. So because computers have accelerated the rate of double-checking, we're now able to look back and find that this foundation that we thought we were on that was so stable, is now shaky. So facts, they come and go, but learning how to think strong and learning how models can help you think better, that's something really worth working towards. And that's something that I can hopefully today with our time together show you, demonstrate. You already know that all models are wrong, but they can be useful anyway. Still, it's one thing to hear that, it's another thing to see it, to experience it. So here's my proposal. I'm going to write you live a couple lines of code. We're going to take some decisions of real actual importance to you in your daily life, and and simplify them down to simple models, and write a couple lines of code, and give you insight. This is my promise, this is my goal, to give you insight into actual important decisions in your everyday life. I think we can do it with just a couple lines of code. And I'm going to try to it home, this claim that, as fake as they are, as simple as they are, that they can still actually be useful. Not just for science, but for you, important decisions in your life. It's a tall order. We're going to see if we can pull if off. We're going to see if I can convince you. So you face risky decisions every day. Everything from should I go with my stable favorite thing at my favorite restaurant or should I get this thing I've never had before. That's a small risky decision. All the way up to picking the career that you'll work at the rest of your life. Or picking the relationship that will take you through the rest of your life. These are all big terrifying decisions. Not just for for you, for everybody. And some of them are sort of, we'll call them less risky. They feel less risky, like picking a new entree. And some of them feel more risky. And the sort of intuition, what we go through life sort of experiencing is that the smaller risks, it's easier to go risky. We should gamble on the smaller decisions. But on the bigger ones, on the ones we'll live with for the rest of our lives, we should be more risk-averse. We should be more neutral. So that's our intuition. We're going to challenge that with a simple model. I'm going to try to actually get you to come out thinking exactly the opposite. This is my challenge today. So with each of these risks, we can think there's the long shot and the safe bet. So your safe bets, your favorite entree. The long shot is this new thing you haven't tried before. Your safe bet is your favorite restaurant that's always consistent. The long shot is that restaurant you never been to before that will probably be worse, but every now and then is a lot better. Your safe bet in looking for relationships or looking for friends might be house parties with your other friends. You have a good sense everyone will be okay. The long shot is talking to a random person at Safeway. Most of those conversations are going to go really badly. But it's a big world out there. Every now and then it's just going to go better. A safer bet in careers is going to be reaching out through friends or maybe maybe a headhunter, some professional can get you a fine job for you. Where the long shot would be Craigslist. Most jobs in Craigslist, awful. But believe me, some of my friends have had amazing, totally unrealistic fantastic jobs on Craigslist. So you've got safe bets and long shots in all of these important types of decisions in your life. Here's our first modeling step. I'm going to model the safe bet versus the long shot as a draw from from two jars, two piles of numbers. I want to pick high numbers from the jar. But I'm picking randomly, I don't get to pick. I'm just going to pick out a number. And the safe bet, I'm always going to pick the number 7, 8, or 9. The long shot, I could pick any number 1 through 10. So most of the numbers I'm going to pick are going to be lower, but every now and then, I'll pick a better number. And this is our model, this is our model of safe bets versus risky decisions. We've already thrown away all the details. Suddenly, in this model, I can't tell a difference between your career and your relationships and your favorite entree. We've abstracted all that detail away and simplified it down to a simple thing. Okay.
