The art of uncertainty: living with chance, ignorance, risk, and luck
David Spiegelhalter introduces his latest book, The Art of Uncertainty How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck.
Chance, luck, and ignorance; how to put our uncertainty into numbers. We all have to live with uncertainty about what is going to happen, what has happened, and why things turned out how they did. We attribute good and bad events as "due to chance", label people as "lucky", and (sometimes) admit our ignorance.
David Spiegelhalter will show how to use the theory of probability to take apart all these ideas, and demonstrate how you can put numbers on your ignorance, and then measure how good those numbers are. Along the way we will look at three types of luck, and judge whether Derren Brown was lucky or unlucky when he was filmed flipping ten heads in a row.
Following the event David will be signing copies of the book.
Meet our speaker and chair
David Spiegelhalter (@d_spiegel) is Emeritus Professor of Statistics in the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, having previously held the posts of Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk, and Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication. He works on ways to improve the way that statistical evidence is used by health professionals, patients, lawyers and judges, media and policymakers. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics.
Tengyao Wang teaches in the Department of Statistics at LSE and is the MSc Statistics (Financial Statistics) Programme Director. He is broadly interested in the area of high-dimensional statistics. His research focuses mainly on developing computationally efficient procedures for high-dimensional problems, while at the same time understanding the potential statistical limitations imposed by computational constraints.
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