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More or Less: Behind the Stats

How to approach the world through numbers

More or Less: Behind the Stats

BBC

Business, Mathematics, Science, News Commentary, News

4.63.5K Ratings

🗓️ 16 September 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How can we navigate our lives in a more efficient and satisfactory way? It’s a question Professor David Sumpter is looking to answer in his new book, Four Ways of Thinking. He talks to Tim Harford about four different approaches to our day to day challenges. Presenter: Tim Harford Producer: Jon Bithrey Sound Engineer: Andy Fell Editor: Richard Vadon (Picture: Conceptual illustration of mathematics Credit: Science Photo Library / Getty)

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

0:09.6

Thank you for downloading the more or less podcast.

0:12.6

We are weekly guides to the numbers all around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim

0:16.4

Harford.

0:17.6

This week, my guest is David Sumpter, he's professor of Applied Mathematics at the University

0:22.5

of Uppsala, Sweden, and the author of a new book, Four Ways of Thinking, David, welcome

0:27.9

to more or less.

0:28.9

Thank you very much.

0:29.9

Four Ways of Thinking.

0:32.0

You got this idea from the prodigy Stephen Wolfram, I understand, why are you explaining

0:36.8

the book?

0:37.8

Tell us a little bit about him and why you wanted to adapt his work.

0:41.4

It was a very nice starting idea, so Wolfram, he was a sort of child genius and a theoretical

0:46.4

physicist, and he had this idea that every system in the world could be explained as being

0:50.8

either stable, periodic, chaotic or complex, and so you can think of this in various different

0:57.7

ways.

0:58.7

It's maybe an argument that somebody might want to have, or somebody is having an argument,

1:03.0

and you can think of a stable argument, comes to an agreement very quickly.

1:06.3

A periodic argument is a back and forth just going through the same arguments over and

1:11.5

over again, chaotic argument.

1:13.7

You don't really know, nobody knows what they're talking about, and a complex argument

1:17.9

is when you're really getting to the substance of a matter, and so that's a way to think

...

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