University of Cambridge

This is the audio transcription of the Cambridge Science Festival 2017 programme.

This is the audio transcription of the Cambridge Science Festival 2017 programme.

Many extremist ideologies rely heavily on conspiracy theories to explain how the world works and where power lies. This lecture explores what our understanding of conspiracy theories – where they come from, how they work, who believes in them – can tell us about dealing with extremism. The US presidential election campaign showed that conspiracy theories are increasingly becoming part of the currency of democratic politics. Is democracy itself becoming more extremist? Where do the boundaries lie between the contestation of democratic values and the repudiation of them? This lecture will examine the relationship between harmless conspiracy theories, dangerous extremism and the rise of ‘post-truth’ politics and it will ask how we can still draw the line between them.

Biography

David Runciman is Professor of Politics and Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at Cambridge University. His books include Political Hypocrisy and The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis and he writes regularly about politics for the London Review of Books. He is one of the directors of a major Leverhulme-funded research project based in Cambridge on Conspiracy and Democracy, which explores the history and impact of conspiracy theories on democratic politics. (More details of the project can be found here: http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/) He is the host of the popular weekly podcast Talking Politics.

Distributions that are dominated by extremes and tail events require a completely different way of thinking. We provide a classification and show where conventional statistical tools fail, such as the conventional law of large numbers. We show how robust statistics is not robust at all; how frequency-based forecasting fails and how past averages misrepresent future ones. We show implications for decision-making in the real world and what modifications are required. Ironically they are often easier to work with. See http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FatTails.html for more details and papers.

Biography

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability. 
 Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, and Antifragile) covering broad facets of uncertainty. It has been translated into 36 languages. In addition to his trader life, Taleb has also published, as a backup of the Incerto, more than 45 scholarly papers in statistical physics, statistics, philosophy, ethics, economics, international affairs, and quantitative finance, all around the notion of risk and probability. He spent time as a professional researcher (Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU ’s School of Engineering and Dean’s Professor at U. Mass Amherst). His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle disorder (“antifragile”). Taleb refuses all honors and anything that “turns knowledge into a spectator sport”.

Much contemporary discussion around feminism concentrates on how to get more women into positions of power and prestige, whether in academia, politics or business. Lorna Finlayson argues that in order to represent all women, feminists must do better.

The past year, 2016, was the warmest globally in records stretching back to 1850. The second warmest year was 2015 and the third warmest 2014. In recent years we have seen weather records being broken more and more often with severe heatwaves, floods and other extreme weather around the world. The risk of some of these extreme weather events has been shown to have increased as a consequence of climate change linked to human activities. In this talk I will discuss the scientific evidence surrounding the causes and consequences of climate change and the prospects for the future. Dr Shuckburgh is co-author of a new Ladybird book on Climate Change which will be published in January 2017. The book has been written with co-authors HRH The Prince of Wales and Tony Juniper, former Executive Director of Friends of the Earth.

Biography

Dr Emily Shuckburgh is a climate scientist and is deputy head of the Polar Oceans Team at the British Antarctic Survey, which is focused on understanding the role of the polar oceans in the global climate system. She holds a number of positions at the University of Cambridge (fellow of Darwin College, member of the Faculty of Mathematics, associate of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research, associate fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy, member of the Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment and fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership). In the past she has worked at Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris and at MIT . She is a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and co-chair of their Climate Science Communications Group, a trustee of the Campaign for Science and Engineering and a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences. She has also acted as an advisor to the UK Government on behalf of the Natural Envrionment Research Council.

Speaking as part of the University of Cambridge's 'Brexit Week' - which took place from 18 to 22 October 2016 - Anand Menon gives his response to the discussion topic of 'The UK and Brexit: How, why and where now?'.

Professor Anand Menon is a Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King’s College London, and Director of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative.

Speaking as part of the University of Cambridge's 'Brexit Week' - which took place from 18 to 22 October 2016 - Jonathan Portes gives his response to the discussion topic of 'The UK and Brexit: How, why and where now?'.

Jonathan Portes is a Principal Research Fellow at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, and a Senior Fellow of UK in a Changing Europe initiative. Previously, he was Chief Economist at the Cabinet Office, where he advised the then Cabinet Secretary, Gus O’Donnell, and Number 10 on economic and financial issues.

Speaking as part of the University of Cambridge's 'Brexit Week' - which took place from 18 to 22 October 2016 - Catherine Barnard gives her response to the discussion topic of 'The UK and Brexit: How, why and where now?'.

Professor Catherine Barnard is a Professor of European Union Law and Employment Law at the Faculty of Law, and a Fellow and Senior Tutor of Trinity College, Cambridge, She is also a Senior Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative.

Speaking as part of the University of Cambridge's 'Brexit Week' - which took place from 18 to 22 October 2016 - Matthew Elliott gives his response to the discussion topic of 'The UK and Brexit: How, why and where now?'.

Matthew Elliott is the former Chief Executive of the Vote Leave campaign, now Editor-at-Large of BrexitCentral. He was a founder and former Chief Executive of the political think tank The TaxPayers' Alliance.