The Art of Uncertainty
How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck
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3.4 • 11 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by Forbes and The Economist
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 of sports falls into the realm of luck? When authorities categorize a given event as “highly likely”—how likely is that, really? Whether we’re trying to decide if the benefits of a new medication are worth the chance of side effects or if artificial intelligence truly threatens humanity, our lives are riddled with uncertainties both everyday and existential—yet it can be difficult to know how to properly weigh all those unknowns. Luckily for us, renowned statistician David Spiegelhalter has spent his career dissecting data to resolve the apparently random and decode the many decisions we face with imperfect information. In The Art of Uncertainty, he shows how we can become better at dealing with what we don’t know to make smarter choices in a world so full of puzzling variables.
In lucid, lively prose, Spiegelhalter guides us through the principles of probability, illustrating how they can help us think more analytically about everything from medical advice to sports to climate change forecasts. He demonstrates how taking a mathematical approach to phenomena we might otherwise attribute to fate or luck can help us sort hidden patterns from mere coincidences, better evaluate cause and effect, and predict what’s likely to happen in the future. Along the way, we learn how a misinterpretation of a probability contributed to the infamous Bay of Pigs fiasco, why a ship twice the size of the Titanic sank without a trace, and why we can be so confident that no two properly shuffled decks of cards have ever been in the same order.
Sparkling with wit and fascinating real-world examples, this is an essential guide to navigating uncertainty while also retaining the humility to admit what we don’t, or simply cannot, 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.
Customer Reviews
This is literally a mathematical book
If any one is suffering from insomnia, this book is better than any sleeping pills you can get.