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 鈥淎 Taste of Armageddon鈥�. In the episode, the premise is that a planet doesn鈥檛 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 鈥渂est鈥� option, when there are almost always other options that could yield the same or even more beneficial results.
