The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk, and Luck

From our “greatest living statistical communicator” (Tim Harford) comes an invaluable, data-driven guide for understanding—and learning to embrace—risk and uncertainty in our daily lives.

How dangerous is our diet? How much in sports comes down to luck? When authorities pronounce that a given event is “highly likely”—well, how likely is that, really? Our lives are riddled with risk and uncertainty, and renowned statistician David Spiegelhalter has spent his career crunching data to decode the seemingly random events that define our experiences, as well as the numerous decisions we each make in the face of imperfect knowledge. In The Art of Uncertainty, he illuminates how all of us can do this better. Revealing the principles of probability—a field that informs everything from annuities to pandemics and climate change—he shows how we can measure our confidence, better evaluate cause and effect, and update our beliefs about the future in the face of constantly changing experience. Drawing on fascinating real-world examples, this is an essential guide to navigating uncertainty in a world that makes it inevitable.