Chances Are . . .: Adventures In Probability (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
This book struck my personal resonant frequency. I found the anecdotes witty and engaging, the conclusions often insightful, and the underlying premise -- that life can best be appreciated as a motley collection of random events, the shape of which can be estimated with varying degrees of confidence but not quantified with certainty… and that anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something -- fully in line with my own philosophy. It further preached to this particular choir member by referencing a number of anecdotes and authors that I had previously come across and enjoyed (most notably Gerd Gigerenzer's discussion of doctors and breast cancer in Calculated Risks, which dramatically illustrates how use of frequencies -- out of 1,000 women between the ages of 40 and 50, 8 will have breast cancer, etc., leading up to a demonstration that the likelihood of a woman in her 40s having breast cancer is actually only 1 in 10 -- is intuitively easier to grasp for both patients and doctors). To reduce the risk that my rave of this work has more to do with my own idiosyncracies than the book's underlying merits, I'm going to let the authors speak for themselves.. You may draw your own conclusions, and I will butt back in at the end.On combinatorics and certainty (p. 11): "[C]an you devise a machine that encompasses (or, at the very least, names) all that might happen?… The question remains 'How right do you need to be?' -- and there are large areas of life where we may not yet be right enough…. Einstein famously remarked that he did not believe God would play dice with the universe. The probabilistic reply is that perhaps the universe is playing dice with God."On fate (pp. 38-39): "DeMoivre saw God revealed in the pattern of randomness… banished… by Descartes, Divinity returns in the unepected mathematical perfection of chance events. The bell curve shows the trace of an almighty hand -- though, of course, particular cases can lie well off the midpoint. DeMoivre himself was just such an outlier. He gained little from his genius; even his curves are now named for Gauss and Poisson. He was always a bit too much or too little for the world he lived in, but his own series at last converged at the age of eighty-seven. According to the story, having noticed that he was sleeping a little longer every day, he predicted the day when he would never awake… and on that day he died, as the bill of death put it, of 'somnolence.'"On scientific mistrust (pp. 146-7): "[A point about] the dismal reputation of statistics: that dry and empty sensation in the stomach's core when the subject arises, either in assignment or in conversation. Any newspaper reader would be able to make sense of one of Galton's essays, but Pearson carried statistics off into a mathematical thicket that has obscured it ever since. He was a scientist and wrote for scientists -- but this meant that the ultimate tool of science, its measure of certainty, became something the rest of us had to take on trust. Now that the calculation is further entombed, deep within the software that generates statistical analyses, it becomes even more like the pronouncement of an oracle: the adepts may interpret, but we in the congregation can only raise our hands and wonder."On the origins of modern law (p. 181): "Each element of [Justinian's Digest] was derived from a Roman legacy, but the spirit of it -- its subtlety, proliferation of terms, and artificiality -- was entirely medieval. Corals of interpretation grew over the rock of law, and their effect was to move questions of likelihood and credibility from rhetoric into textual analysis. It was no longer the audience in the forum [sic] that would decide if an interpretation was likely; it was the skilled professional with a degree. Justinian had intended to give the world law; unintentionally, he gave it lawyers."On chaos ad absurdam (p. 221): "[Iteration] forbids prediction…. Tell me how precise you want to be, and I can introduce my little germ of instability one decimal place farther along; it may take a few more repetitions before the whole system's state becomes unpredictable, but the inevitability of chaos remains. The conventional image has the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil causing a storm in China, but even this is a needlessly gross impetus. The physicist David Ruelle, a major figure in chaos theory, gives a convincing demonstration that suspending the gravitational effect on our atmosphere of one electron at the limit of the observable universe would take no more than two weeks to make a difference in Earth's weather equivalent to having rain rather than sun during a romantic picnic."On war (pp. 258-9): "Trying to figure your chances so far into the future may convince you that 'you can't get there from here': you may miss the most desirable payoff and choose an initial strategy that eventually goes against your interests -- acting, in error, like an irrational player…. [Take the origins of WWI, for example.] 'Ah, well,' said Jovanovic, [Serbia's public information minister in 1914] , 'I suppose there's nothing to do but die fighting.' Of course there was an alternative -- it simply was too painful to consider. For these beleaguered [Serbo-Croat] ministers, it seemed more rational to set the fatal machine [of European alliances] in motion than to submit [to Austria's demands.] Linked mobilizations went ahead across Europe. Within three days, Russia, Germany and France were officially at war. At one moment Kaiser Wilhelm lost his nerve and tried to halt the relentless plan -- but his commanding general explained, in tears, that the train schedule was too complex to meddle with now. The Gernam Chancellor Bethman-Hollweg prayed: 'When the iron dice roll, may God help us.' But God refused to play; instead, the millions fell beneath the trembling hand."On the frailty of knowledge (p. 299): "We have pursued truth through a labyrinth and come up against a mirror. It turns out that things seem uncertain to us because certainty is a quality not of things but of ideas. Things seem to have particular ways of being or happening because that is how we see and sort experience…"I have two last comments. First, it should be evident from the selected passages that Michael and Ellen Kaplan (the father-daughter authorial team) make heavy use of irony and contrast to make their points. Second, if this did not come across from the examples I provided, I should clarify that the Kaplans don't present a fatalist, pessimistic world view. Rather, through repeated exploration of the implications of a world with infinite variation and tentative (in terms of reliability) underlying logic, they propose humility, curiosity, and wonder. It seems to me profoundly sensible and exquisitely ironic that their thoroughly rational, agnostic analysis should share a major conclusion of theism. But I think they would argue that that's simply what comes of being human.
I really enjoyed this book. Not only does "Chances Are" entertain it also surprises with interesting facts. My favourite lines quote the work of Joseph de Maistre, who was influential in Leo Tolstoy's epic "War and Peace". “On a vast terrain covered with all the tools of carnage, that seems to crumble under the tread of men and horses; in the middle of fire and swirls of smoke . . . People will say gravely to you: “How can you not know what happened in the fight, since you were there?”— where often one could say precisely the contrary." That's how I used to feel every day after work.
What do You think about Chances Are . . .: Adventures In Probability (2006)?
Few of us have a good grasp of probability, as the good ol' Monty Hall problem illustrates (which is interesting, because that problem isn't covered in this book). This is a very approachable book requiring little math skill, although there are a few sections with symbology that might look scary to the uninitiated. Looks are deceiving. It's pussycat stuff. The reader is rewarded with a better awareness of the subject, which should be helpful when analyzing choices or evaluating the statements of others.
—Andrew Skretvedt
I really liked this book. This is the best book on the elusive yet quantifiable nature of Probability. The authors, a son and mother team, tie in history, vignettes of the personalities involved in progressing our understanding of this branch of knowledge. The book is jam packed with history, math, and connections to probability in many aspects of life. The authors wander in and out of topics, always tying them to the main topic, and they cover a lot of ground.I highly recommend this to anyone with any interest in probability and chance.
—Russell
A tour of basic pop-math stuff. Overall it was decent.The writers REALLY like the sound of their own voice. Practically every other paragraph in the first few chapters either starts or ends with some flowery, grandiose sentence to make sure you know how large their vocabularies are. It's really obnoxious. It thins out a bit in the second half of the book but is still there.If you can get past that, there's some interesting stuff in here. Nothing groundbreaking, but the chapters on judging and insurance are pretty cool.Overall: read this if you've read a lot of pop science/math books, have a hunger for more, and can tolerate a fair amount of pretentiousness in a book.
—Steve Losh
