Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty

PREFACE

The History of Science has suffered greatly from the use by teachers of second-hand material, and the consequent obliteration of the circumstances and the intellectual atmosphere in which the great discoveries of the past were made.

R. A. Fisher¹

Sir Ronald A. Fisher, the founder of modern statistics, was certainly correct to point out how much is lost by abstracting major scientific developments from the context in which they evolved. However, it is clearly impractical for all but a few specialists to delve into original source material, especially when it is technical (or in Latin). In this book, I have attempted to convey some of the “circumstances and intellectual atmosphere” that have led to our modern idea of probability. I believe this is important for two reasons. First, to really appreciate what probability is all about, we must understand the process by which it has come about. Second, to transcend the limitations our current conception imposes on us, we must demystify probability by recognizing its inadequacy as the sole yardstick of uncertainty.

Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty can be regarded as two books in one. On one hand, it is a history of a big idea: how we have come to think about uncertainty. On the other, it is a prescription for change, especially with regard to how we perform research in the biomedical and social sciences. Modern probability and statistics are the outgrowth of a convoluted process that began over three centuries ...