The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck

A deep modern irony is that, despite talking about "uncertainty" all the time, we are very uncertain about what we mean by "uncertainty". With remarkable clarity, David Spiegelhalter takes us on a tour of both uncertainty and how we humans conceptualize, measure, and manage uncertainty. The book is rich with insightful observations and powerful ideas. While parts of the book are a bit technical, he writes in a way that a reader with no desire to delve into technical details will enjoy the book and come away with a markedly clearer set of ideas about uncertainty. A great book on a ubiquitous and important topic.

Found the narrative portions of the book a thoughtful and engaging journey into the subject of uncertainty. But getting through the math of it all was a slog, making it difficult to apply to everyday life.

This is a superb overview of probability theory with applications to the everyday world. It is written with the clarity and grace that distinguished the author's The Art of Statistics. A most informative and enjoyable read.

Excellent overview of assessing strength of predictions. Lots of stats might put some readers off, but they need not be grasped to get the basic substance. Non-stat folk can easily understand the issues because of the examples and connections. Distinguishing between "probability" and "certainty" helps the lay-reader understand decision making and research. This book is a valuable antidote to media and other outlets that report research or decision making that tend to be simplistic and often erroneous.

Highly technical tome on uncertainty. Great and technical explanation of why uncertainty exists - probably a little too technical for my level. Kind of like a graduate level book on uncertainty. I found Chapter 15 on making decisions and managing risks as useful and interesting as any other part of the book. It provides a summary list of considerations of making decisions under uncertainty. They are: - Complexity - Redundancy - Humility - Robustness - Resilience - Reversibility -Adaptivity After over 200 plus pages on what uncertainty is and what are its causes, I only wish that there had been more on how to make better decisions under uncertainty.

I have the authors first book, The Art of Statistics, so got this one. Enjoyed it but it was hard for me. Maybe a reader can help me: pages 49 to 50 describe a problem called Hannah's Sweets. I get that the probability of Hannah eating an orange sweet is 6/n, where n = the total number of sweets. We are told there are six orange sweets. But I don't get the probability that the second sweet she eats is 5/n-1. I get the n-1 but 5? Where does it say that the first sweet she ate was orange? I feel dumb.

Very ,very good. Highly recommended. Useful--no ,essential--if you trade any securities, or just want to idnetify what those lunatics are doing.

Those, who teach statistic should read the book and advise the students to be more conscious about logistic regressions!