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 arguing that people should be 'rational' and always use probability to deal with uncertainty.

Probability often seems counter-intuitive - can you explain why?

I think it's because probability does not really exist - it had to be made up. So no wonder it does not work as intuitively as our feeling for counts, weight, time, distance and other quantities - although even for these we can have trouble with big and small numbers.

How would you persuade a frequentist to take a more Bayesian approach?

I don't think I want to persuade them to use a different approach, but I would want them to understand the potential advantages in some circumstances of thinking in a Bayesian way.

What’s next?

This book has wrung me dry - I have put in all the ideas I have had brewing for years. So nothing is next - I am a dried-out husk.

What’s exciting you at the moment?

Promoting the themes in the book, whether it's deconstructing luck, or arguing that probabilities do not exist as an objective properties of the world. Except of course at the sub-atomic quantum level. Probably.

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