March 12, 2021
To round out the week was another awesome online class! We spent a good portion of the day working on our modeling activities, where we learn about how to use statistics and math to predict outcomes to a certain event, such as how many COVID cases a population will have based on the current number of cases and the growth rate. Additionally, we talked about a very interesting Star Trek episode titled “A Taste of Armageddon”. In the episode, the premise is that a planet doesn’t want war, so they fight a war with computers, randomly forcing their own to commit suicide. We spend a good portion of time talking about the ethics of this, and how QALYs (quality adjusted life-years) play into this. This was a very important part of our day, as we all left the discussion looking at the world a little differently. Finally, we talked about how diseases are transmitted, and discussed HIV/AIDS. One major takeaway that I personally had was how sometimes our minds see one option for something as the “best” option, when there are almost always other options that could yield the same or even more beneficial results.
