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

David Spiegelhalter Five Way interview

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. He was previously Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication and has presented the BBC4 documentaries Tails you Win: the Science of Chance, the award-winning Climate Change by Numbers. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics , was published in March 2019. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018), and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His latest book is The Art of Uncertainty . Why probability? because I have been fascinated by the idea of probability, and what it might be, for over 50 years. Why is the ‘P’ word missing from the title? That's a good question. Partly so as not to make it sound like a technical book, but also because I did not want to give the impression that it was yet another book

Vector - Robyn Arianrhod ****

This is a remarkable book for the right audience (more on that in a moment), but one that's hard to classify. It's part history of science/maths, part popular maths and even has a smidgen of textbook about it, as it has more full-on mathematical content that a typical title for the general public usually has. What Robyn Arianrhod does in painstaking detail is to record the development of the concept of vectors, vector calculus and their big cousin tensors. These are mathematical tools that would become crucial for physics, not to mention more recently, for example, in the more exotic aspects of computing. Let's get the audience thing out of the way. Early on in the book we get a sentence beginning ‘You likely first learned integral calculus by…’ The assumption is very much that the reader already knows the basics of maths at least to A-level (level to start an undergraduate degree in a 'hard' science or maths) and has no problem with practical use of calculus. Altho

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