The Art of Uncertainty
How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
‘Probably the UK’s greatest living statistician’ Telegraph
From the UK’s ‘statistical national treasure’, a clever and data-driven guide to how we can live with risk and uncertainty
We live in a world where uncertainty is inevitable. How should we deal with what we don’t know? And what role do chance, luck and coincidence play in our lives?
David Spiegelhalter has spent his career dissecting data in order to understand risks and assess the chances of what might happen in the future. In The Art of Uncertainty, he gives readers a window onto how we can all do this better.
In engaging, crystal-clear prose, he takes us through the principles of probability, showing how it can help us think more analytically about everything from medical advice to pandemics and climate change forecasts, and explores how we can update our beliefs about the future in the face of constantly changing experience. Along the way, he explains why roughly 40% of football results come down to luck rather than talent, how the National Risk Register assesses near-term risks to the United Kingdom, and why we can be so confident that two properly shuffled packs of cards have never, ever been in the exact same order.
Drawing on a wide range of captivating real-world examples, this is an essential guide to navigating uncertainty while also having the humility to admit what we do not know
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spiegelhalter (The Art of Statistics), a statistics professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, delivers a stimulating survey of the myriad ways humans have attempted to quantify the unknown. "Probabilities are subjective judgments," Spiegelhalter contends, pointing out that calculating them requires deciding what kinds of information to include in a dataset and which situations count as positive outcomes. Exploring how people have strived to predict the future with statistics, Spiegelhalter describes how in the 1690s, English astronomer Edmond Halley reviewed data on the frequency with which people died at various ages to tabulate how much the English government should charge for annuities, and how in the late 1980s, the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts developed a prediction system that involved running weather modeling software 50 times under slightly different starting conditions to see which meteorological phenomena were most likely to occur. Elsewhere, he expounds on calculating coincidences, noting that the odds that a monkey typing at random would produce the complete works of Shakespeare is equivalent to "winning the lottery every week for 20,000 years." Spiegelhalter's explanation of Bayesian statistics—which, at its simplest level, makes contingent predictions that are updated in the face of new evidence—is among the most accessible readers are likely to find, and the case studies effectively ground the mathematical discussions. This is a sure bet.
