Love The Emergence of Probability? Readers share 29 books like The Emergence of Probability...

By Ian Hacking,

Here are 29 books that The Emergence of Probability fans have personally recommended if you like The Emergence of Probability. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History

Thomas Moynihan Author Of X-Risk

From my list on history is driven by chance and choice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I often think of the ways my life could have gone differently. Career-changing emails that were only narrowly rescued from spam folders, for example. In many parallel timelines, I doubt I’m still doing what I do today—which makes me cherish my good fortune to still be doing it. What I do is study the ways people have come to understand everything can go otherwise and that the future is, therefore, an open question and undecided matter. Of course, for ages, many have instead assumed that events can only go one way. But the following books persuasively insist history isn’t dictated by destiny, but is governed by chance and (sometimes) choice.

Thomas' book list on history is driven by chance and choice

Thomas Moynihan Why did Thomas love this book?

My dad read sections of this book aloud to me when I was far too young to grasp anything inside. It is, after all, a book on Darwinism written by a paleontologist who specialized in macroevolutionary patterns. Such polysyllabic words were inscrutable to me. But, back then, I could look at the cover. The copy we had depicted a beautiful scene showing some of the earliest animals to appear on Earth. They are alien creatures—surprisingly unfamiliar—unlike anything alive today.

This left an impression on me: life was different in the past, shockingly different, which became an insight I extended to my study as a historian of ideas researching how human worldviews have also changed drastically over time.

It was fitting that when I returned to the book as a young adult—now old enough to understand it—it immediately became one of my all-time favorites. So, too, did Gould himself, who remains…

By Stephen Jay Gould,

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked Wonderful Life as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived-a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.


Book cover of The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

Bastiaan C. van Fraassen Author Of Philosophy and Science of Risk: An Introduction

From my list on exploring the meaning of probability and risk.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Plato’s Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering. 

Bastiaan's book list on exploring the meaning of probability and risk

Bastiaan C. van Fraassen Why did Bastiaan love this book?

Can you love a book that you disagree with? I do! I love this extravagant account of how Bayesian Statistics was enmired in controversy and, after 200 years, saved everything from Western Civilization to Captain Dreyfus.

I don’t think that Bayesian statistics is the foundation of all rational thought, but I am happy to celebrate all its wonderful achievements. Every page of this book is lively and personal, engrossing, entertaining, masterful…all of that.

By Sharon Bertsch McGrayne,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Theory That Would Not Die as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice: A vivid account of the generations-long dispute over Bayes' rule, one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of applied mathematics and statistics

"An intellectual romp touching on, among other topics, military ingenuity, the origins of modern epidemiology, and the theological foundation of modern mathematics."-Michael Washburn, Boston Globe

"To have crafted a page-turner out of the history of statistics is an impressive feat. If only lectures at university had been this racy."-David Robson, New Scientist

Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new…


Book cover of How to Lie with Statistics

Bastiaan C. van Fraassen Author Of Philosophy and Science of Risk: An Introduction

From my list on exploring the meaning of probability and risk.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Plato’s Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering. 

Bastiaan's book list on exploring the meaning of probability and risk

Bastiaan C. van Fraassen Why did Bastiaan love this book?

I am laughing out loud, even now that I am rereading this book for the umpteenth time. Fraudsters are so clever, and so is advertising. And then there is sloppy journalism with its “wow” statistics.

I like his book enormously, not least because of its witty illustrations. It is subversive, comic, and provocative, and it makes me wise to seductive, misleading practices–and it does so with a light touch.

By Darrell Huff, Irving Geis (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked How to Lie with Statistics as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From distorted graphs and biased samples to misleading averages, there are countless statistical dodges that lend cover to anyone with an ax to grind or a product to sell. With abundant examples and illustrations, Darrell Huff's lively and engaging primer clarifies the basic principles of statistics and explains how they're used to present information in honest and not-so-honest ways. Now even more indispensable in our data-driven world than it was when first published, How to Lie with Statistics is the book that generations of readers have relied on to keep from being fooled.


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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

Book cover of Games, Gods and Gambling

Bastiaan C. van Fraassen Author Of Philosophy and Science of Risk: An Introduction

From my list on exploring the meaning of probability and risk.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Plato’s Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering. 

Bastiaan's book list on exploring the meaning of probability and risk

Bastiaan C. van Fraassen Why did Bastiaan love this book?

I found a copy of this book in the sixties. That copy, much loved, was lost in moves and mayhem. Now, I only have a Dover reprint (water-logged during yet another move), but I have never been without and would search high and low if I were.

This is also a history of probability but with a very different focus. Ms. David was a statistician able to explain the calculations intuitively (good to assign to my students). But she was also thoroughly interested in the personalities involved. What was Galileo like? What happened to Pascal at Port-Royal?

I felt personally drawn into the historical narrative that often reads like a novel. 

By F. N. David,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Games, Gods and Gambling as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The development of gambling techniques led to the beginning of modern statistics, and this absorbing history illustrates the science's rise with vignettes from the lives of Galileo, Fermat, Pascal, and others. Fascinating allusions to the classics, archaeology, biography, poetry, and fiction endow this volume with universal appeal. 1962 edition.


Book cover of Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better

Bastiaan C. van Fraassen Author Of Philosophy and Science of Risk: An Introduction

From my list on exploring the meaning of probability and risk.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Plato’s Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering. 

Bastiaan's book list on exploring the meaning of probability and risk

Bastiaan C. van Fraassen Why did Bastiaan love this book?

I love this book because it builds practical advice on a philosophical critique.

Can philosophy generate truly practical advice for planning and public policy? Randomized Controlled Trials are the gold standard for evidence in industrial planning and public policy. But if the results are taken naively, they mislead.

I’m a long-time fan of author Nancy Cartwright, a McArthur Genius Award winner. I love her provocative approach when abstract thought has to confront real practice.  

By Nancy Cartwright, Jeremy Hardie,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Evidence-Based Policy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized…


Book cover of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

Thomas Moynihan Author Of X-Risk

From my list on history is driven by chance and choice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I often think of the ways my life could have gone differently. Career-changing emails that were only narrowly rescued from spam folders, for example. In many parallel timelines, I doubt I’m still doing what I do today—which makes me cherish my good fortune to still be doing it. What I do is study the ways people have come to understand everything can go otherwise and that the future is, therefore, an open question and undecided matter. Of course, for ages, many have instead assumed that events can only go one way. But the following books persuasively insist history isn’t dictated by destiny, but is governed by chance and (sometimes) choice.

Thomas' book list on history is driven by chance and choice

Thomas Moynihan Why did Thomas love this book?

The modern age lumbers on like a wounded mammoth, but are its wounds fatal?

This is the question Hans Blumenberg asks in this magisterial, cathedralic book. The project and promise of modernity, Blumenberg points out, consists of the attempted rejection of all arbitrary forms of authority. That is, all powers that cannot justify themselves through human argument and agreement, whether this be derived from the arbitrariness of one’s birthplace or background, unquestioning adherence to tradition, or to nature’s blind and bloody precedent.

Abraded to its minimalist core, it is this kernel of the modern project—the birth of which Blumenberg traces to the late Middle Ages—that we can thank for later advances ranging from civil rights to women’s liberation. But, in the wake of the atrocities that split the previous century in half, the legitimacy of modernity came into question. Technoscience, the handmaiden of modernity, seemed a plausible culprit for gas…

By Hans Blumenberg, Robert M. Wallace (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Legitimacy of the Modern Age as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Löwith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside. Instead, Blumenberg argues, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized by human self-assertion, by man's responsibility for his own fate.


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Book cover of I Am Taurus

I Am Taurus by Stephen Palmer,

The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.

Each of the sections is written from…

Book cover of Contingency and Convergence

Thomas Moynihan Author Of X-Risk

From my list on history is driven by chance and choice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I often think of the ways my life could have gone differently. Career-changing emails that were only narrowly rescued from spam folders, for example. In many parallel timelines, I doubt I’m still doing what I do today—which makes me cherish my good fortune to still be doing it. What I do is study the ways people have come to understand everything can go otherwise and that the future is, therefore, an open question and undecided matter. Of course, for ages, many have instead assumed that events can only go one way. But the following books persuasively insist history isn’t dictated by destiny, but is governed by chance and (sometimes) choice.

Thomas' book list on history is driven by chance and choice

Thomas Moynihan Why did Thomas love this book?

One of my favorite living writers is Rachell Powell. She writes on animal ethics, genetic engineering, and invertebrate intelligence, among other topics.

Powell’s brilliant 2020 book can be seen as a spiritual sequel to Gould’s aforementioned 1989 Wonderful Life. Hence, it makes sense to include both on the list. Powell takes Gould’s experiment on “replaying the tape” and updates it, given modern knowledge, while also establishing its relevance for the cutting-edge scientific field of astrobiology.

Astrobiology is the study of what we should look for when we look for signs of life beyond Earth. It’s a burgeoning field at the frontier of human knowledge, poised to provide revelatory knowledge about our own fate and future, regardless of whether the results of the search for extraterrestrial life are positive or negative. 

Assessing the role of chance in governing the course of biological evolution—whether here or elsewhere in the universe—is, as…

By Rachell Powell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Contingency and Convergence as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Can we can use the patterns and processes of convergent evolution to make inferences about universal laws of life, on Earth and elsewhere?

In this book, Russell Powell investigates whether we can use the patterns and processes of convergent evolution to make inferences about universal laws of life, on Earth and elsewhere. Weaving together disparate philosophical and empirical threads, Powell offers the first detailed analysis of the interplay between contingency and convergence in macroevolution, as it relates to both complex life in general and cognitively complex life in particular. If the evolution of mind is not a historical accident, the…


Book cover of Thomas Browne: Selected Writings

Thomas Moynihan Author Of X-Risk

From my list on history is driven by chance and choice.

Why am I passionate about this?

I often think of the ways my life could have gone differently. Career-changing emails that were only narrowly rescued from spam folders, for example. In many parallel timelines, I doubt I’m still doing what I do today—which makes me cherish my good fortune to still be doing it. What I do is study the ways people have come to understand everything can go otherwise and that the future is, therefore, an open question and undecided matter. Of course, for ages, many have instead assumed that events can only go one way. But the following books persuasively insist history isn’t dictated by destiny, but is governed by chance and (sometimes) choice.

Thomas' book list on history is driven by chance and choice

Thomas Moynihan Why did Thomas love this book?

Given I study old books, I wanted to include at least one. I was tempted to recommend either Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, for its sheer strangeness, or Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, for including the best poetic lines ever written about a cat, or, otherwise, John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The latter can be read as an early declaration of human freedom in the face of the totalitarianism of nonhuman forces (be they demonic or divine), but, more importantly, one that is sensitive to the pitfalls of such self-assertion (“sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,” is how Adam and Eve are described). Now that thermonuclear weapons exist, this latter truth applies to humankind as a global collective.

But, numinous as Milton is, his work is familiar, so I decided to recommend a writer from his period who, albeit less famous today, is just as searingly good.

That would…

By Kevin Killeen (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Thomas Browne as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers an authoritative, comprehensive selection of the work of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, the edition demonstrates the breadth of the author of some of the most brilliant and delirious prose in English Literature.

Lauded by writers ranging from Coleridge to Virginia Woolf, from Borges to W.G. Sebald, Browne's distinct style and the musicality of his phrasing have long been seen as a pinnacle of early modern prose. However, it is Browne's range of subject matter that makes him truly distinct. His writings include…


Book cover of The Taming of Chance

Joseph Leo Koerner Author Of Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life

From my list on against writers’ block.

Why am I passionate about this?

My father was an artist who painted passionately, almost always outdoors. When I told him I wanted to become an art historian, he was sad partly because he hated art historians, but mainly because he imagined me chained (as a writer) to a desk, rather than marching the countryside looking for things to paint or draw. Like most writers, I sometimes get seriously bogged down, and his sadness comes back to haunt me. But then I pick up a book that, in just a few pages, puts my writing back on track, gladdening my father’s ghost.

Joseph's book list on against writers’ block

Joseph Leo Koerner Why did Joseph love this book?

Are you stuck on a single sentence that keeps expanding but goes nowhere? Then tame it by cutting it down and finishing it off now. Ian Hacking is the master of the subject-verb-predicate sentence in historical writing. And this book, in addition to being a model of stylistic clarity, changes how we think about modernity, mathematics, danger, and risk. You’ll never be afraid of being clear again.

By Ian Hacking,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Taming of Chance as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this important study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaken in such previous works as the best-selling The Emergence of Probability. Professor Hacking shows how by the late-nineteenth century it became possible to think of statistical patterns as explanatory in themselves, and to regard the world as not necessarily deterministic in character. In the same period the idea of human nature was displaced by a model of normal people with laws of dispersion. These two parallel transformations fed into each other, so that chance made the world seem…


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Book cover of The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever

The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier,

The coaching book that's for all of us, not just coaches.

It's the best-selling book on coaching this century, with 15k+ online reviews. Brené Brown calls it "a classic". Dan Pink said it was "essential".

It is practical, funny, and short, and "unweirds" coaching. Whether you're a parent, a teacher,…

Book cover of Thinking in Cases

Bonnie Evans Author Of The Metamorphosis of Autism: A History of Child Development in Britain

From my list on the making of the modern self.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in this topic began after my father died when I was a young teenager and I was left looking for answers, explanations, and meanings. My dad was an architect and had written a book on Jeremy Bentham’s panoptican and prison architecture published before the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s famous Discipline and Punish. A small collection of Foucault’s books stood prominently on my father’s bookshelves and I really wanted to understand them. At university I studied all of Foucault’s works and many authors inspired by him. These are the best books that explain how we have developed philosophical and psychological theories to understand ourselves in the contemporary world.

Bonnie's book list on the making of the modern self

Bonnie Evans Why did Bonnie love this book?

Forrester’s excellent, yet sadly unfinished, Thinking in Cases, advanced a radical new way to consider the history of the human sciences and their modelling of the self or the individual. Whereas Hacking and Foucault focused on population-based statistical styles of reasoning as the means by which the modern state operated, Forrester argues that these ‘styles of reasoning’ were always supported by what he has termed ‘case-based reasoning.’ In doing so, Forrester considers how biopolitical power has been advanced via both legal and medical cases. He describes his approach as being informed by ‘three rhizomic structures,’ namely ‘the psychoanalytic case history; the historical sociology of the sciences; and the individual in the human sciences.’ This rhizomic model is unique to Forrester’s approach, and allows him to move freely between law, anthropology, medicine, politics, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences, in his reflections on the case. He asks us to reflect on…

By John Forrester,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Thinking in Cases as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What exactly is involved in using particular case histories to think systematically about social, psychological and historical processes? Can one move from a textured particularity, like that in Freud's famous cases, to a level of reliable generality? In this book, Forrester teases out the meanings of the psychoanalytic case, how to characterize it and account for it as a particular kind of writing. In so doing, he moves from psychoanalysis to the law and medicine, to philosophy and the constituents of science. Freud and Foucault jostle here with Thomas Kuhn, Ian Hacking and Robert Stoller, and Einstein and Freud's connection…


Book cover of Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History
Book cover of The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
Book cover of How to Lie with Statistics

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