Skip to main content

The Art of Uncertainty - David Spiegelhalter *****

There's something odd about this chunky book on probability - the title doesn't mention the P word at all. This is because David Spiegelhalter (Professor Sir David to give him his full title) has what some mathematicians would consider a controversial viewpoint. As he puts it 'all probabilities are judgements expressing personal uncertainty.' He strongly (and convincingly) argues that while the mathematical approach to probability is about concrete, factual values, outside of the 'natural' probabilities behind quantum effects, almost all real world probability is a subjective experience, better described by more subjective terms like uncertainty, chance and luck.

A classic way to distinguish between those taking the frequentist approach to probability and the Bayesian approach is their attitude to what the probability is of a fair coin coming up heads or tails after the coin has been tossed but before we have looked at it. The frequentist would say it's definitely heads or tails, but we can't say which. The Bayesian would say it's still 50:50 because we don't have any information yet. Spiegelhalter puts himself firmly into the Bayesian camp. However, even the most rabid frequentist could not find issue with Spiegelhalter's careful and detailed introduction to the nature of probability and how we use it.

There are plenty of real world examples here, from Covid-19 risks to picking socks at random from a drawer. Spiegelhalter provides us with a range of stories to back these examples up, making large parts of the content highly readable. If I have a criticism, I think the book is too long and could have had a tighter structure. I felt myself drifting away from interest and skipping through a few pages (it is over 400 pages long) occasionally - but always came back into focus as a new topic was covered.

As was the case with its earlier companion, The Art of Statistics, this is not going to turn you into an expert. Although there is some gentle mathematics, there is nothing more complicated than getting your head around conditional probability representations - but there is no doubt that reading the book will give you a better idea of what probability is, how it's used and abused, and why we can be more precise about some predictions than others. You will have to work a little to absorb what's in here - but it's worth the effort.

I think this pair of books should become classics, very much in the tradition of the Pelican imprint, which always been intended to inform non-experts without patronising. If you've ever heard Spiegelhalter speak, everything is put across in a warm, favourite uncle fashion - this is the case with the best parts of his writing too. It's a voice of reason in an area that can sometimes seem counter-intuitive, and it is very welcome.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
These articles will always be free - but if you'd like to support my online work, consider buying a virtual coffee:
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Antigravity Enigma - Andrew May ****

Antigravity - the ability to overcome the pull of gravity - has been a fantasy for thousands of years and subject to more scientific (if impractical) fictional representation since H. G. Wells came up with cavorite in The First Men in the Moon . But is it plausible scientifically?  Andrew May does a good job of pulling together three ways of looking at our love affair with antigravity (and the related concept of cancelling inertia) - in science fiction, in physics and in pseudoscience and crankery. As May points out, science fiction is an important starting point as the concept was deployed there well before we had a good enough understanding of gravity to make any sensible scientific stabs at the idea (even though, for instance, Michael Faraday did unsuccessfully experiment with a possible interaction between gravity and electromagnetism). We then get onto the science itself, noting the potential impact on any ideas of antigravity that come from the move from a Newtonian view of a...
Post a Comment
Read more

The World as We Know It - Peter Dear ***

History professor Peter Dear gives us a detailed and reasoned coverage of the development of science as a concept from its origins as natural philosophy, covering the years from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. inclusive If that sounds a little dry, frankly, it is. But if you don't mind a very academic approach, it is certainly interesting. Obviously a major theme running through is the move from largely gentleman natural philosophers (with both implications of that word 'gentleman') to professional academic scientists. What started with clubs for relatively well off men with an interest, when universities did not stray far beyond what was included in mathematics (astronomy, for instance), would become a very different beast. The main scientific subjects that Dear covers are physics and biology - we get, for instance, a lot on the gradual move away from a purely mechanical views of physics - the reason Newton's 'action at a distance' gravity caused such ...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more