Lesson 7: Evidence Is Not Proof | Alex Edmans

Visualize this: it’s a hot summer day and you bite into a delicious ice cream cone. Refreshing, right? But now imagine it’s the dead of winter. Would that ice cream bring the same joy on a freezing morning? Probably not. Just like ice cream is delightful in the summer but less appealing in the cold, evidence that holds true in one context might come up short in another.

In this video lesson, Professor Alex Edmans demonstrates why context is crucial when evaluating evidence and why something that seems true in one setting may not be universally applicable.

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About Alex Edmans:

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. Alex graduated from Oxford University and then worked for Morgan Stanley in investment banking (London) and fixed income sales and trading (New York). After a PhD in Finance from MIT Sloan as a Fulbright Scholar, he joined Wharton in 2007 and was tenured in 2013 shortly before moving to LBS.

Alex’s research interests are in corporate finance, responsible business and behavioural finance. He is a Director of the American Finance Association; Vice President of the Western Finance Association; Fellow, Director, and Chair of the Ethics Committee of the Financial Management Association; Fellow of the British Academy; and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. From 2017-2022 he was Managing Editor of the Review of Finance, the leading academic finance journal in Europe.

Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, presented to the World Bank Board of Directors as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series, and given the TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World and the TEDx talks The Pie-Growing Mindset and The Social Responsibility of Business with a combined 2.8 million views. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harvard Business Review and World Economic Forum and been interviewed by Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and Sky Sports.