Useful ... Proving what is 'obvious and simple' isn’t always easy. Kucharski offers the delightful example of Muriel Bristol, a scientist who always put the milk in her cup before pouring her tea, because she insisted it tasted better.
Takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the history of what has counted as proof ... Mr. Kucharski speaks from experience, since he was one of the experts first called upon by the British government for advice on the Covid-19 pandemic. He explains brilliantly the fragmentary and confusing nature of the data then available, and the provisional conclusions they led to. ... This book covers a lot of terrain, and Mr. Kucharski occasionally strains to draw links between the worlds of politics and science.
The book’s answer is do more of the same, but do it better, and, above all, acknowledge and communicate the uncertainties. This just might rebuild public trust in 'the evidence'. This seems both the right thing to do and, in today’s context, hopelessly inadequate.
Illuminating ... Kucharski acknowledges that his area of inquiry is vast, and at points, the book’s leaps from the history of mathematics to, say, the difficulty of analysing Covid variants, do induce intellectual whiplash. And the more he warms to his theme, the more unwieldy the concept of proof appears ... But in a way that’s the point. What we consider to be proof is slippery ... This is a serious book by a serious person. It’s full of gnarly theorems and concepts. But it’s also a virtuosic look at the varied and sometimes amusing ways human beings have over the centuries used their intelligence to make sense of the world.
A wide-ranging study on separating facts from fiction, truth from lies, and evidence from presumptions ... Kucharski does a good job of exposing the flaws in these approaches and sees the 'unknown unknowns' as the main obstacle on the path to truth. The book does not offer much advice about how to extract nuggets of truth from mountains of verbiage, but the best option, the author says, is to keep an open mind.
