Everything Is Predictable
How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
“Bayes’s moment has clearly arrived.” —The Wall Street Journal
A captivating and user-friendly tour of Bayes’s theorem and its global impact on modern life from the acclaimed science writer and author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy.
At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything.
But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem? How did an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician uncover a theorem that would affect fields as diverse as medicine, law, and artificial intelligence?
Fusing biography, razor-sharp science writing, and intellectual history, Everything Is Predictable is an entertaining tour of Bayes’s theorem and its impact on modern life, showing how a single compelling idea can have far reaching consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This beguiling mathematical romp from science writer Chivers (The Rationalist's Guide to the Galaxy) surveys the far-reaching applications of the statistics theorem elaborated by the 18th-century English minister Thomas Bayes, who showed how to estimate the probability that a hypothesis is true by considering new data alongside "prior" assessments of the hypothesis's accuracy. (For instance, the theorem might determine the probability that a middle-aged woman has Covid by considering a positive test result alongside the virus's prevalence rate among middle-aged women generally.) Bayes's theorem produces startling insights that can upend conventional wisdom, Chivers writes, noting that the equation explains why "a cancer test can be 99 percent accurate even though 99 percent of the people it says have cancer don't." Examining the theorem in a raft of offbeat contexts, the author suggests its focus on evaluating new information in the context of previous beliefs sheds light on why vaccine skeptics are unmoved by evidence demonstrating vaccines' safety and efficacy, and why contestants guessing which door hides a prize on Let's Make a Deal should always switch their pick after the host reveals one of the losing doors. Chivers's dive into probability theory is heady but lucid, and conveys arcane concepts in commonsensical prose. The result is a stimulating take on making sense of a murky, uncertain reality. Photos.
