What are some of the most common mistakes that people make in reasoning? The field of study "Heuristics and Biases" explores some of these questions. In this class we will explore some of the most common mistakes (which are shortcuts that lead to bad conclusions) that people make, and we will try to fix some of them. Here is a list of some of the topics that we may cover, with more introduced in class: Availability Heuristic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic Curse of knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge Selection bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias Overconfidence effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect

In this class students will learn about the main techniques of calculating probabilities of events and how to make decisions under uncertainty. The material will be motivated by games (cards, dice, etc), where the techniques learned in class will help you come up with better strategies. Great emphasis will be placed on learning through solving problems and on elegant strategies for solving (difficult!) problems. Topics  Sample spaces, events  Counting Techniques  Bayes theorem, conditional probability, and independence  Random variables, expected values,  Important distributions

- Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem has many implications, one of which is that "no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can ...