We just started this unit in humanities all about disruption. Specifically disruption of technology. We where then introduced a new question, How has technology acted as a disruption with its creation throughout history? We started talking about the different types of disruption whether they are negative or positive. A few positive examples where like “using my phone everyday to stay connected with people” but there were some negative like “the information and pictures on my phone may not be secure”. Along with this we read a book called Little Brother, that would deepen our understanding of technology.

Throughout Little Brother the word Bayesian Probability popped up a lot. I started to research this term and found some very interesting information. The Bayesian Probability was originally discovered by Thompson Bayes a mathematician in the 18th century. In Little brother they talked about how nobody really knew him or what he did, until people actually discovered his invention was very useful.

Thompson Bayes

The Bayesian Probability would basically tell you how much you could trust something. Say a doctor was testing a baby for Moebius syndrome (facial paralysis in fetus’s). Only 1 in 50,000 births to America are diagnosed with this syndrome each year. Many doctors might receive a positive on a test, this is where the Bayesian probability can help you. The Bayesian probability takes the statistics and runs it through an equation:

Ex. if cause A might be the reason for symptom X, then we have to take into account both the probability that A caused X (found, roughly, by multiplying the frequency of A with the chance that A causes X) and the probability that anything else caused X. (Click here for full article)

Dennis V Lindley, one of the Founding Fathers of Bayesian Probability statistics

This will then tell you the chances of the positive turning into a false positive (this is more common than positives in this case). The Bayesian probability can also tell you things like which event are most likely going to happen, or find patterns of expressions.

By now you might be wondering what Little Brother is about! To answer your question, its basically about some kids that embark on an adventure to bring back justice and freedom to the corrupt department of home security, after a deadly bomb is set off by terrorists on San Francisco’s Bay bridge. I would 100% recommend this book if you haven’t read it yet! Throughout this book it also brings up great questions about the internet like how safe we really are, if our information is protected, and how easy it really is to find out everybody’s personal information. The idea of probability was brought to attention when the main character Markus debates with his father about if police officers should use the Bayesian probability to decide if somebody is guilty or not. This brings us back to the idea of disruption in technology, how much can we really trust these devices to make decisions for us? I mean do we really even know how these devices work, why they work? The author of this book, Cory Doctorway seems to also have a very strong opinion on technology. I think his underlining message of this book is that we should really know how technology works before we can trust it. Just like how we should know how things like the Bayesian probability works before using it.

Sometimes it’s difficult to make sense of why we trust these things to make decisions for us, this has disrupted our way of living! We depend on technology for the smallest and largest of things. We depend on systems like the Bayesian Probability to tell us if we can trust something. The book was definitely an eye opener and made me think a lot more about the idea of disruption. It was also interesting to learn about the Bayesian probability, something I never knew existed!