Lecture 4

readings

• Desrosières, Ch 2
• Hankins, on Herschel's Graphical Methods
• Ch 4 of Bouk, on how our lives became numbered
• optional: Bersch Ch 2: Bayes, Laplace, and "inverse probability"

discussion: Smoothing, Bayes' Rule, Least Squares

In Lecture 4 we covered

• the interplay of the "social science", mathematics, and astrophysics communities
• Smoothing on Trial (ch 4 of Bouk)
• how models must be argued for and are themselves an asset towards that argument
• how models themselves change the world, separating performance and performativity