Customer Reviews

The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life (Ideas in Context)

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Speaking as a psychological scientist, the information conveyed in this book should be essential study for all students planning to conduct social science studies and analyze them with statistics. Period. The ideas conveyed in mainstream statistical education for 21st century social scienctists is still a incoherent mash of ideas in need of serious scrutiny. An important task for every scientist to take part in, and here is a place to start questioning and improving how we design studies and draw conclusions from their results. Mathematical techniques for analysis of studies is relatively new, yet it's treated as ancient ossified dogma. Bizarre. Reading this book will clear your mind in many ways if you are this type of reader. If you're a mathematician, or already know a lot of the history behind mainstream social science and statistics, you might be interested in books that cover even more marginal territories such as those mentioned by the other reviewer. For everyone else, say, if you don't know what the Neyman-Pearson theory of statistics is, you need to get this now.

Gigerenzer(G)does a B+ discussion of the particular items he is interested in covering ,such as the conflict between Neyman(Pearson)and Sir Ronald Fisher over significance levels and confidence intervals and their meaning.However, there is practically no,or a very limited,discussion of the subjectivist theory of probability(Ramsey and de Finetti)or of the logical theory of probability(John Maynard Keynes and Rudolf Carnap).A potential reader ,who is interested in either of the above mentioned approaches to probability ,is forewarned that his curiosity will not be satisfied by reading this book.