Shownotes Transcript
Preface
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Preface
Author’s Note to the Curious Reader
Uncertainty takes us on a journey through ancient philosophy, to renaissance mathematicians, to modern machine learning practitioners. It discusses how our minds and our brains handle uncertainty, and how and why the uncertainty caused by humans might be unconquerable. It also discusses modern technological developments, such as machine learning and blockchain, and explains how they affect the economy and the world around us.
I make the case that the common thread that connects the history of humankind to our current technological progress is uncertainty.
In the first chapter we’ll explore a brief history of uncertainty – how the unknown has shaped civilisation, the manifold ways that it can encroach on our lives, and the different kinds and guises of uncertainty.
In the following chapter, we’ll tackle one of the most important philosophical problems. Inductive reasoning is the process through which we create theories about the world; it is the foundation of scientific thinking. Methodologically speaking, it is one of the most important tools in our arsenal in the war on uncertainty. But why and how it works are questions that have baffled thinkers for more than two thousand years. We’ll discuss how the problem was approached by philosophers of different eras, and what this has to do with some of the current tools that we use against uncertainty.
In chapters 3 to 5 we’ll take a look at probability theory. We will see how this theory came to be, and we’ll address some alternative theories to probability.
In chapter 6, we’ll take a look at information theory, and the work of Claude Shannon – the first person to quantify uncertainty.