PROBABILITY: How a 250-Year-Old Theorem Still Explains the World

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Back in the 1700s, in a spa town outside of London, Thomas Bayes, a Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician, invented a formula that lets you figure out how likely something is to happen based on what you already know. It changed the world. Today, pollsters use it to forecast election results and bookies to predict Super Bowl scores. For neuroscientists, it explains how our brains work; for computer scientists, it's the principle behind artificial intelligence. In this episode, we explore the modern-day applications of this game-changing theorem with the help of Tom Chivers, author of the new book "Everything Is Predictable: How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World." 🎙️ Follow The Next Big Idea Daily on Apple Podcasts or Spotify 🎁 Get 20% off a Next Big Idea Club membership when you use code PODCAST at nextbigideaclub.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn presents.
0:05.0	I'm Michael Kavnat and this is the next big idea.
0:10.0	Today, how to predict anything. Now what would you say if I told you that I'd found a single theory that explains everything.
0:35.8	Get a grip, Michael, that's nice, dear? No, most likely you wouldn't say anything, but you'd simply
0:41.6	give me a wide berth as you walked past me anything but you'd simply give me a wide birth as you walked
0:43.2	past me quickly and you'd have good reason because monom myths and grand unified
0:48.3	theories are the stuff of conspiracies and the province of Kooks. But then again, what if I put a little
0:55.6	more meat on the bone and I said I had a theory that explained everything
0:59.6	from evolution by natural selection to Good Poker Strategy, from Presidential Elections to
1:06.4	Super Bowl outcomes, from today's weather to how AI works, to human consciousness itself. And what if I said that theory could be summed up in
1:15.8	just a handful of symbols in a formula made up of just about a dozen characters
1:20.8	invented by an obscure 18th century Presbyterian minister who died without
1:26.7	publishing it. But then you might be more likely to say, Michael, prove it. All right, so let me try.
1:33.4	Today I'm chatting with Tom Chivers,
1:36.0	author of the new book,
1:37.6	Everything is Predictable,
1:39.2	how Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World. Now wait, don't press that skip button yet. I know the word
1:45.6	statistics might be yawn-inducing for some of you and trauma-inducing for others.
1:51.2	So let me reframe it for you. What Tom and I are going to be talking about
1:55.3	is how to see into the future. Fortune telling, prophecy. That sounds juicier, right?
2:02.1	Tom is an award-winning British science journalist who's written for The Times of London, The Guardian, New Scientist, and Wired, among other publications.
2:11.0	His previous books include The Rationalists Guide to the Galaxy and How to Read Numbers.
	...

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