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\u201cThere are very few things we can fix in everybody\u2019s life by getting to the bottom of the Big Bang,\u201d he joked.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn my grandiose optimistic picture,\u201d he said, \u201ceventually everybody is learning this stuff and can go into conversations feeling like their job isn\u2019t to convince everyone that they\u2019re right, but to figure out where they\u2019re making mistakes and hearing everyone out.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The class is offered every spring to undergraduate students. The syllabus includes sessions on identifying and combating bias; recognizing the ways humans fool themselves into seeing patterns; and understanding the dangerous appeal of citing one cause to explain a complex problem, such as blaming crime on immigrants.<\/p>\n
For a class assignment on a difficult conversation, one student finally confronted a roommate who kept forgetting to take out the trash. Instead of coming to her angrily, the student looked at her own biases first\u00a0\u2014 why did the trash situation bother her so much?\u00a0\u2014 and went into the conversation understanding that her roommate had her own reasons and biases for not taking out the trash.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not like my roommate was trying to insult me,\u201d said sophomore Maude Windsor.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s since had other difficult conversations, including some around politics with people who did not agree with her. \u201cI just remind myself that it\u2019s not personal, or even if I think it is, it\u2019s maybe not that serious,\u201d Windsor said. \u201cI realize that I\u2019m allowed to remove my emotions from the situation, and I think I\u2019m better off for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The class ends with an event called a \u201cdeliberative poll.\u201d Students break into groups to discuss, debate and vote on a timely topic. This year\u2019s class debated artificial intelligence, including whether, and how, emotional chatbots should be regulated for minors and for adults.<\/p>\n
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The students read an information packet and several proposed regulations, ranging from no regulation to essentially banning AI chatbots. After reading the information, everyone voted for one option. Then they listened to a panel of experts talking about AI chatbots, including how they could help people and how they could cause harm.<\/p>\n
After the panel presentation, the students discussed the topic in groups. Then they had one more round of questions with the panel, and voted again. The poll results were reported almost immediately\u00a0\u2014 and showed, in fact, that many students had changed their minds over the course of the panel and discussion.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t appear that anyone made a dramatic shift\u00a0\u2014 no one went from no regulation to banning AI. But some students moved from, say, blocking minors from accessing AI to allowing it with parental guidance. Other students opted for more control after hearing the panelists and discussions.<\/p>\n
\u201cI definitely held a more pessimistic side\u201d before the deliberative poll, said freshman Arion Togelang. But he said the panelists helped him feel a little more optimistic about AI and less like it should be regulated to the point of preventing access.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think right now it\u2019s a little hard for me to understand what AI can do, or what\u2019s better about AI than humans,\u201d Togelang said. \u201cI still don\u2019t understand that, but I can try to share their optimism that it will improve.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Deliberative polling has been used in the real world, perhaps most notably, Perlmutter said, in Ireland, where policymakers used the technique to develop legislation around abortion. The process involved pulling together a random sample of voters, giving them factual information on the topic and access to experts in the field, then polling them on their preferred legislation.<\/p>\n
At the end of the polling, the participants favored a somewhat more liberal approach than regulators had expected. That fed into a referendum that removed Ireland\u2019s constitutional ban on abortion in 2018.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Still, in the current U.S. climate, freshman Chad Smith said the \u201celephant in the room\u201d when it comes to the class is how well these lessons hold up in the real world, where many political disagreements feel impossible to bridge.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think having more space to be wrong is necessary,\u201d Smith said. \u201cWhat this class did is show us how we lack flexibility. I expected it to be like, \u2018Oh, my gosh, everyone is uninformed.\u2019 But, really, the Achilles\u2019\u00a0heel in society is that everyone is too loud. People lack civility.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Togelang agreed with the concept of having more space to be wrong. His father is a MAGA adherent, and they\u2019ve fought for years over politics. \u201cHow can he have such ideas? That used to really offend me,\u201d Togelang said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s sometimes hard. You won\u2019t be able to change someone\u2019s mind really easily at this point,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I feel like I\u2019ve changed. Instead of trying to change their mind, maybe I instill this idea that there\u2019s still room for knowledge and room to recognize errors. That\u2019s my goal nowadays.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr. Saul Perlmutter, the 2011 Nobel laureate, in 2023. The Berkeley course he helped start, called \u201cSense and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[15,1570,143,145,144,645,149],"class_list":["post-310166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-education","tag-health","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-science","tag-uc-berkeley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}