Everything is Predictable

Chalkdust

19 February 2025

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Tom Chivers is a science writer and author and his third book Everything is Predictable (Blackwell’s, Waterstones) is all about Bayes’ theorem, its history, and its many applications in science and beyond.

Style

Everything is Predictable is an enjoyable book about Bayes’ theorem, covering its history and contrasting the Bayesian approach to the, potentially, more familiar frequentist approach. Tom has a fun writing style and the book is packed full of lots of examples that help to explain the concepts. Strangely, this is one of two books on this years shortlist that appears to have kept some placeholder text in one of the figures, I will not spoil where this happens and leave looking out for it as a fun extra activity to do while reading.

Control

The ideas are well explained and I found the discussion of the mathematical concepts easy to follow, there are also lots of nice examples of Bayesian thinking beyond the typical examples from medical testing.

Damage

Probability and statistics can often be taught in quite a dry way, or at least this was my experience as a student, but this book really brings the story to life. If you are like me, then after reading it you will start thinking about how you can be more Bayesian in your everyday life. When in doubt just think What Would a Bayesian Do? Probably update their prior.

Aggression

This book was a really good read, and I enjoyed learning about some of the history of many of the tools we take for granted in probability and statistics today. Anyone interested in probability, or how experiments are used to confirm scientific theories, should read this book.

You can vote for your favourite book on the Book of the Year shortlist below. The winning book will be crowned the Chalkdust Readers’ Choice. Voting closes at midday (GMT) on Wednesday 26 February 2024.

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