Here are 29 books that The Emergence of Probability fans have personally recommended if you like
The Emergence of Probability.
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I often think of the ways my life could have gone differently. Career-changing emails that were only narrowly rescued from spam folders, for example. In many parallel timelines, I doubt Iâm still doing what I do todayâwhich makes me cherish my good fortune to still be doing it. What I do is study the ways people have come to understand everything can go otherwise and that the future is, therefore, an open question and undecided matter. Of course, for ages, many have instead assumed that events can only go one way. But the following books persuasively insist history isnât dictated by destiny, but is governed by chance and (sometimes) choice.
My dad read sections of this book aloud to me when I was far too young to grasp anything inside. It is, after all, a book on Darwinism written by a paleontologist who specialized in macroevolutionary patterns. Such polysyllabic words were inscrutable to me. But, back then, I could look at the cover. The copy we had depicted a beautiful scene showing some of the earliest animals to appear on Earth. They are alien creaturesâsurprisingly unfamiliarâunlike anything alive today.
This left an impression on me: life was different in the past, shockingly different, which became an insight I extended to my study as a historian of ideas researching how human worldviews have also changed drastically over time.
It was fitting that when I returned to the book as a young adultânow old enough to understand itâit immediately became one of my all-time favorites. So, too, did Gould himself, who remainsâŚ
High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived-a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa storiesâall reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argueâŚ
Iâve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Platoâs Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, Iâve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering.
Can you love a book that you disagree with? I do! I love this extravagant account of how Bayesian Statistics was enmired in controversy and, after 200 years, saved everything from Western Civilization to Captain Dreyfus.
I donât think that Bayesian statistics is the foundation of all rational thought, but I am happy to celebrate all its wonderful achievements. Every page of this book is lively and personal, engrossing, entertaining, masterfulâŚall of that.
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice: A vivid account of the generations-long dispute over Bayes' rule, one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of applied mathematics and statistics
"An intellectual romp touching on, among other topics, military ingenuity, the origins of modern epidemiology, and the theological foundation of modern mathematics."-Michael Washburn, Boston Globe
"To have crafted a page-turner out of the history of statistics is an impressive feat. If only lectures at university had been this racy."-David Robson, New Scientist
Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective newâŚ
Iâve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Platoâs Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, Iâve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering.
I am laughing out loud, even now that I am rereading this book for the umpteenth time. Fraudsters are so clever, and so is advertising. And then there is sloppy journalism with its âwowâ statistics.
I like his book enormously, not least because of its witty illustrations. It is subversive, comic, and provocative, and it makes me wise to seductive, misleading practicesâand it does so with a light touch.
From distorted graphs and biased samples to misleading averages, there are countless statistical dodges that lend cover to anyone with an ax to grind or a product to sell. With abundant examples and illustrations, Darrell Huff's lively and engaging primer clarifies the basic principles of statistics and explains how they're used to present information in honest and not-so-honest ways. Now even more indispensable in our data-driven world than it was when first published, How to Lie with Statistics is the book that generations of readers have relied on to keep from being fooled.
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,âŚ
Iâve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Platoâs Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, Iâve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering.
I found a copy of this book in the sixties. That copy, much loved, was lost in moves and mayhem. Now, I only have a Dover reprint (water-logged during yet another move), but I have never been without and would search high and low if I were.
This is also a history of probability but with a very different focus. Ms. David was a statistician able to explain the calculations intuitively (good to assign to my students). But she was also thoroughly interested in the personalities involved. What was Galileo like? What happened to Pascal at Port-Royal?
I felt personally drawn into the historical narrative that often reads like a novel.Â
The development of gambling techniques led to the beginning of modern statistics, and this absorbing history illustrates the science's rise with vignettes from the lives of Galileo, Fermat, Pascal, and others. Fascinating allusions to the classics, archaeology, biography, poetry, and fiction endow this volume with universal appeal. 1962 edition.
Iâve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Platoâs Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, Iâve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering.
I love this book because it builds practical advice on a philosophical critique.
Can philosophy generate truly practical advice for planning and public policy? Randomized Controlled Trials are the gold standard for evidence in industrial planning and public policy. But if the results are taken naively, they mislead.
Iâm a long-time fan of author Nancy Cartwright, a McArthur Genius Award winner. I love her provocative approach when abstract thought has to confront real practice. Â
Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomizedâŚ
I often think of the ways my life could have gone differently. Career-changing emails that were only narrowly rescued from spam folders, for example. In many parallel timelines, I doubt Iâm still doing what I do todayâwhich makes me cherish my good fortune to still be doing it. What I do is study the ways people have come to understand everything can go otherwise and that the future is, therefore, an open question and undecided matter. Of course, for ages, many have instead assumed that events can only go one way. But the following books persuasively insist history isnât dictated by destiny, but is governed by chance and (sometimes) choice.
The modern age lumbers on like a wounded mammoth, but are its wounds fatal?
This is the question Hans Blumenberg asks in this magisterial, cathedralic book. The project and promise of modernity, Blumenberg points out, consists of the attempted rejection of all arbitrary forms of authority. That is, all powers that cannot justify themselves through human argument and agreement, whether this be derived from the arbitrariness of oneâs birthplace or background, unquestioning adherence to tradition, or to natureâs blind and bloody precedent.
Abraded to its minimalist core, it is this kernel of the modern projectâthe birth of which Blumenberg traces to the late Middle Agesâthat we can thank for later advances ranging from civil rights to womenâs liberation. But, in the wake of the atrocities that split the previous century in half, the legitimacy of modernity came into question. Technoscience, the handmaiden of modernity, seemed a plausible culprit for gasâŚ
In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl LĂświth's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside. Instead, Blumenberg argues, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized by human self-assertion, by man's responsibility for his own fate.
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlifeâmostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket miceânear her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marksâŚ
I often think of the ways my life could have gone differently. Career-changing emails that were only narrowly rescued from spam folders, for example. In many parallel timelines, I doubt Iâm still doing what I do todayâwhich makes me cherish my good fortune to still be doing it. What I do is study the ways people have come to understand everything can go otherwise and that the future is, therefore, an open question and undecided matter. Of course, for ages, many have instead assumed that events can only go one way. But the following books persuasively insist history isnât dictated by destiny, but is governed by chance and (sometimes) choice.
One of my favorite living writers is Rachell Powell. She writes on animal ethics, genetic engineering, and invertebrate intelligence, among other topics.
Powellâs brilliant 2020 book can be seen as a spiritual sequel to Gouldâs aforementioned 1989 Wonderful Life. Hence, it makes sense to include both on the list. Powell takes Gouldâs experiment on âreplaying the tapeâ and updates it, given modern knowledge, while also establishing its relevance for the cutting-edge scientific field of astrobiology.
Astrobiology is the study of what we should look for when we look for signs of life beyond Earth. Itâs a burgeoning field at the frontier of human knowledge, poised to provide revelatory knowledge about our own fate and future, regardless of whether the results of the search for extraterrestrial life are positive or negative.Â
Assessing the role of chance in governing the course of biological evolutionâwhether here or elsewhere in the universeâis, asâŚ
Can we can use the patterns and processes of convergent evolution to make inferences about universal laws of life, on Earth and elsewhere?
In this book, Russell Powell investigates whether we can use the patterns and processes of convergent evolution to make inferences about universal laws of life, on Earth and elsewhere. Weaving together disparate philosophical and empirical threads, Powell offers the first detailed analysis of the interplay between contingency and convergence in macroevolution, as it relates to both complex life in general and cognitively complex life in particular. If the evolution of mind is not a historical accident, theâŚ
I often think of the ways my life could have gone differently. Career-changing emails that were only narrowly rescued from spam folders, for example. In many parallel timelines, I doubt Iâm still doing what I do todayâwhich makes me cherish my good fortune to still be doing it. What I do is study the ways people have come to understand everything can go otherwise and that the future is, therefore, an open question and undecided matter. Of course, for ages, many have instead assumed that events can only go one way. But the following books persuasively insist history isnât dictated by destiny, but is governed by chance and (sometimes) choice.
Given I study old books, I wanted to include at least one. I was tempted to recommend either Lawrence Sterneâs Tristram Shandy, for its sheer strangeness, or Christopher Smartâs Jubilate Agno, for including the best poetic lines ever written about a cat, or, otherwise, John Miltonâs Paradise Lost. The latter can be read as an early declaration of human freedom in the face of the totalitarianism of nonhuman forces (be they demonic or divine), but, more importantly, one that is sensitive to the pitfalls of such self-assertion (âsufficient to have stood, though free to fall,â is how Adam and Eve are described). Now that thermonuclear weapons exist, this latter truth applies to humankind as a global collective.
But, numinous as Milton is, his work is familiar, so I decided to recommend a writer from his period who, albeit less famous today, is just as searingly good.
This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition demonstrates the breadth of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature.
Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebald, Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings includeâŚ
My father was an artist who painted passionately, almost always outdoors. When I told him I wanted to become an art historian, he was sad partly because he hated art historians, but mainly because he imagined me chained (as a writer) to a desk, rather than marching the countryside looking for things to paint or draw. Like most writers, I sometimes get seriously bogged down, and his sadness comes back to haunt me. But then I pick up a book that, in just a few pages, puts my writing back on track, gladdening my fatherâs ghost.
Are you stuck on a single sentence that keeps expanding but goes nowhere? Then tame it by cutting it down and finishing it off now. Ian Hacking is the master of the subject-verb-predicate sentence in historical writing. And this book, in addition to being a model of stylistic clarity, changes how we think about modernity, mathematics, danger, and risk. Youâll never be afraid of being clear again.
In this important study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as the best-selling The Emergence of Probability. Professor Hacking shows how by the late-nineteenth century it became possible to think of statistical patterns as explanatory in themselves, and to regard the world as not necessarily deterministic in character. In the same period the idea of human nature was displaced by a model of normal people with laws of dispersion. These two parallel transformations fed into each other, so that chance made the world seemâŚ
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circularâŚ
My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Benthamâs panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucaultâs famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucaultâs books stood prominently on my fatherâs bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucaultâs works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.
Forresterâs excellent, yet sadly unfinished, Thinking in Cases, advanced a radical new way to consider the history of the human sciences and their modelling of the self or the individual. Whereas Hacking and Foucault focused on population-based statistical styles of reasoning as the means by which the modern state operated, Forrester argues that these âstyles of reasoningâ were always supported by what he has termed âcase-based reasoning.â In doing so, Forrester considers how biopolitical power has been advanced via both legal and medical cases. He describes his approach as being informed by âthree rhizomic structures,â namely âthe psychoanalytic case history; the historical sociology of the sciences; and the individual in the human sciences.â This rhizomic model is unique to Forresterâs approach, and allows him to move freely between law, anthropology, medicine, politics, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences, in his reflections on the case. He asks us to reflect onâŚ
What exactly is involved in using particular case histories to think systematically about social, psychological and historical processes? Can one move from a textured particularity, like that in Freud's famous cases, to a level of reliable generality? In this book, Forrester teases out the meanings of the psychoanalytic case, how to characterize it and account for it as a particular kind of writing. In so doing, he moves from psychoanalysis to the law and medicine, to philosophy and the constituents of science. Freud and Foucault jostle here with Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking and Robert Stoller, and Einstein and Freud's connectionâŚ
