Today I gave a talk ”Science and Software Development” at the weactuallybuildstuff.com. The talk was largely inspired by Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science” column and book and try to apply some of the ideas relating to the use and abuse of evidence in the software industry. In the talk I tried to build a case for why the software industry might by to pay more attention to scientific techniques, such as “Randomized Controlled Trails”, by talking about availability bias, Confirmation Bias, the placebo effect and overconfidence. The slides are available on SlideShare:
Additional Material came from The Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson, Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland and the 6th February 2012 Edition of the Guardian Science podcast. The also a large number of quality blogs talking about science scienceblogs.com and The Guardian’s Science blogs seem to be good jumping off points.
A video of the talk should be available soon, I’ll post the link to this blog when it is.
A huge thanks to Greg Young to inviting me to speak and this new and exciting conference!