The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck

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. (Mar.)