Customer Reviews

A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

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This is an awesome book. It is hard to believe Laplace wrote this in 1816; it seems so modern. If you've ever worked on problems like "take two urns, A and B, the first containing four
white and two black balls ..." you'll be interested to know these problems all go back to this book. Laplace said "Probability theory is nothing but common sense reduced to calculation", and he shows it here. I like the discussion of how many judges should be assigned to a case, and what proportion of them should be required to vote guilty for a guilty verdict to be returned. Laplace shows how to minimize expected loss on this problem (although he, somewhat unrealistically, assumes that each judge's opinion is independent of the others).

I recommend this book to people with a science background that want a little light reading. This will probably not be very appealing to the layman.