Everything Is Predictable
How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
I picked this one after hearing about it on a Financial Times podcast. Being a data science professional, it piqued my interest and I wanted to read it.
It's a very interesting book about the impact of Bayes theorem in our lives and its presence in our world. Through this book, Chivers has tried to shed light on its omnipresence in our day to day lives and how we are unintentionally acting as a Bayesian system when making decisions in our lives. Right from the smallest of small decisions to big life decisions.
It's very informative and for someone who's never heard of Bayes or probabilities and their role in our life, this book is a go-to book that I'd recommend. Some of the terminology would be a bit difficult to grasp for people who're unfamiliar with statistical terms like precision, specificity etc. But overall, the writer has done a good job at explaining every concept or idea in a simple and straightforward manner.
Personally, I loved the chapters titled Bayesian Science and The Bayesian Brain. Some very fascinating ideas were discussed in those chapters about how our prior beliefs shape how we view the world and our actions and decisions. And how Bayes theorem is at the heart of these decisions that we make. What the book did for me was make me further curious about reasoning and consciousness and the science of rational thinking. I have added a couple of books and authors who I'd like to read up on.
The only thing that I didn't like about this book was that I felt it was repetitive and trying to show how Bayes theorem is playing a significant role in almost every chapter. But I guess that was the whole point of this book. Additionally, I feel the chapter dedicated to the war between frequentists and bayesians could have been kept short.
I'd surely recommend this to every data professional as well as anyone who wants to understand how probabilities play a vital role in shaping our world and our understanding of it.
