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Quantum Pings Library
The Improbability Principle
- Type
- Book
- By
- David J. Hand
- Publisher
- Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Source
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Published
- 2014
A statistician's tour of why extremely improbable events happen all the time — the clearest mathematical case that coincidence needs no deeper explanation.
David J. Hand, a former president of the Royal Statistical Society, wrote The Improbability Principle (2014) to answer a simple question: why do astonishingly improbable things happen all the time? His answer is a handful of statistical laws — selection, the law of truly large numbers, and probability leverage among them — that together make the "impossible" routine.
This is the definitive skeptical text on this shelf, and it earns that place by being fair. Hand does not mock the feeling of meaning; he explains why the feeling is real even while the events behind it are ordinary. For anyone who wants the mathematics of coincidence without the woo, this is the starting point.
Extremely improbable events are commonplace.
The meaning
The book is fair-minded about why the feeling of meaning is real, even while it argues the underlying events are ordinary.
The skeptic
This is the definitive skeptical text: Hand shows that the "impossible" is not just possible but expected, and lays out the exact laws that make it so.
About the author
British statistician and emeritus professor at Imperial College London; former president of the Royal Statistical Society.
Key takeaways
- Extremely improbable events are commonplace once you count the opportunities.
- Hand lays out the statistical laws (selection, the law of truly large numbers, and more) behind coincidence.
- The strongest single-volume mathematical case for the skeptical view.