How to Expect the Unexpected
The Science of Making Predictions—and the Art of Knowing When Not To
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A “vivid, wide-ranging, and delightful guide” (bestselling author Tim Harford) for understanding how and why predictions go wrong, with practical tips to give you a better chance of getting them right
How can you be 100 percent sure you will win a bet? Why did so many Pompeians stay put while Mount Vesuvius was erupting? Are you more likely to work in a kitchen if your last name is Baker? Ever since the dawn of human civilization, we have been trying to make predictions about what the world has in store for us. For just as long, we have been getting it wrong. In How to Expect the Unexpected, mathematician Kit Yates uncovers the surprising science that undergirds our predictions—and how we can use it to our advantage.
From religious oracles to weather forecasters, and from politicians to economists, we are subjected to poor predictions all the time. Synthesizing results from math, biology, psychology, sociology, medicine, economic theory, and physics, Yates provides tools for readers to understand uncertainty and to recognize the cognitive biases that make accurate predictions so hard to come by.
This book will teach you how and why predictions go wrong, help you to spot phony forecasts, and give you a better chance of getting your own predictions correct.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this smart study, Yates (The Math of Life and Death), a mathematician at the University of Bath, explores the cognitive biases that lead to incorrect predictions. Intuition often conflicts with reality, he explains, suggesting that humans have a linearity bias, or "propensity to believe that things will stay constant or continue at a consistent rate." He contends this bias contributed to the delayed uptake of antiviral measures as Covid-19 cases ticked upward in early 2020, noting a study that found subjects who underestimated the speed of exponential growth were less likely to practice social distancing. Elsewhere, Yates illustrates how people misunderstand probability by discussing the 1967 case of a man who appeared to have predicted a real-life plane crash in a dream. Drawing on research about dream frequency, Yates estimates that "we might expect over 66,000" such dreams across the world in the month before a crash, suggesting that what appeared to be too accurate to be a coincidence was actually to be expected. The survey of the mind's biases intrigues, and the author excels at demonstrating their real-world effects, as when he posits that the tendency to assume things will always be "just the way they are now" contributes to many people's reluctance to observe hurricane evacuation orders and other precautions. It's a safe bet that readers will take to this.
