Everything Is Predictable

384 pages

English language

Published 2024 by Atria Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-6680-5260-0

(2 reviews)

A captivating and user-friendly tour of Bayes’s theorem and its global impact on modern life from the acclaimed science writer and author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy .

At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything.

But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem? How did an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician uncover a theorem that would affect fields as diverse as medicine, law, and artificial …

A captivating and user-friendly tour of Bayes’s theorem and its global impact on modern life from the acclaimed science writer and author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy .

At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything.

But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem? How did an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician uncover a theorem that would affect fields as diverse as medicine, law, and artificial intelligence?

Fusing biography, razor-sharp science writing, and intellectual history, Everything Is Predictable is an entertaining tour of Bayes’s theorem and its impact on modern life, showing how a single compelling idea can have far reaching consequences.

4 editions

xylogx reviewed Everything Is Predictable by Tom Chivers

A Book about Math, Statistics and How They Shape Our View of the World

4 stars

A very quirky and interesting telling of how Bayesian statistics have shaped our world. There is a descent amount of math, but the author is self-conscious about the use of it and it did not doom this book, though I felt it could have been stronger with a bit less. He tries to be objective in comparing the Bayesian view to the frequentist view even though his bias is clear. He talks a lot about how statistics are used in science the consequences of this and I found that to the compelling. While I struggled a little bit with this one, its quirky nature and interesting prose kept my attention long enough for me to care about the content.

piotr

rated it

May 17, 2024