Fluke - Brian Klaas ****

On the whole, popular science books tell us about what science and scientists have achieved. Fluke is very different in this respect - in it, social scientist and professor of global politics Brian Klaas tells us about what the social sciences have failed to achieve, and why.

Perhaps the most familiar aspects of this are in introducing the reader to the implications of chaos theory and of complexity, plus the fall out of the replication crisis that has rendered many older (and quite a few new) social science studies useless. Using plenty of engaging stories (including the fact that his own existence is the outcome, amongst other things, of a horrific killing) Klaas builds a picture of just how many small inputs come together to make anything happen in the complex system of human society.

The implication of this is that is practically impossible to usefully predict the future in the social sciences (so much for Asimov's psychohistory) - in fact, hardly any social science (which includes economics) can say much that's useful about the future. Klaas also points out, for instance, how many economic forecasts from established bodies are wrong (pretty well all of them).

Another fascinating story is how a unique study looked into how immigration influenced voters' support of 'the social safety net'. The same set of data was given to 76 research teams, who weren't allowed to communicate. Each used their own methods, employing a total of 1,253 mathematical models. Just over half found no link at all - the rest were evenly split between a positive and a negative effect. All from exactly the same data.

The one negative I found in reading this was that, though the stories were excellent, I frequently felt 'And...?' - when the main message is that we can't deduce anything much scientifically about human behaviour because the topic is pretty well impossible to usefully quantify, the question kept coming up to me of 'What's the point of this?' In his final chapter, Klaas pulls it all together by effectively encouraging us to embrace the chaos - to accept that things are like this and we should enjoy it, rather than bewail it.

One big question that was left unanswered was to ask 'If the topics of social science are so impossible to effectively study in any quantifiable fashion, why bother at all? Why do we fund all this research?' Despite this, though, I found the book interesting and thought provoking.

Hardback:

Kindle:
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here

Comments

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...

Search This Blog