The Error of Truth: How History and Mathematics Came Together to Form Our Character and Shape Our Worldview

Description

An historical account of how we came to measure uncertainty in our everyday lives. Quantitative thinking is our inclination to view natural and everyday phenomena through a lens of measurable events, with forecasts, odds, predictions, and likelihood playing a dominant part. The Error of Truth recounts the astonishing and unexpected tale of how quantitative thinking came to be, and its rise to primacy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Additionally, it considers how seeing the world through a quantitative lens has shaped our perception of the world we live in, and explores the lives of the individuals behind its early establishment. This worldview was unlike anything humankind had before, and it came about because of a momentous human achievement: we had learned how to measure uncertainty. Probability as a science was conceptualised. As a result of probability theory, we now had correlations, reliable predictions, regressions, the bellshaped curve for studying social phenomena, and the psychometrics of educational testing. Significantly, these developments happened during a relatively short period in world history— roughly, the 130-year period from 1790 to 1920, from about the close of the Napoleonic era, through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolutions, to the end of World War I. At which time, transportation had advanced rapidly, due to the invention of the steam engine, and literacy rates had increased exponentially. This brief period in time was ready for fresh intellectual activity, and it gave a kind of impetus for the probability inventions. Quantification is now everywhere in our daily lives, such as in the ubiquitous microchip in smartphones, cars, and appliances; in the Bayesian logic of artificial intelligence, as well as applications in business, engineering, medicine, economics, and elsewhere. Probability is the foundation of quantitative thinking. The Error of Truth tells its story— when, why, and how it happened. The Error of Truth How History and Mathematics Came Together to Form Our Character and Shape Our Worldview......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 8 Contents......Page 10 Epigraph......Page 12 Chapter 1: The Remarkable Story......Page 14 Chapter 2: The Context......Page 28 Chapter 3: Beginning in Observation......Page 36 Chapter 4: The Patterns of Large Numbers......Page 56 Chapter 5: The Bell Curve Takes Shape......Page 80 Chapter 6: Evidence and Probability Data......Page 96 Chapter 7: At Least Squares......Page 114 Chapter 8: Coming to Everyman......Page 132 Chapter 9: Probably a Distribution......Page 156 Chapter 10: Average Man......Page 176 Chapter 11: Rare Events......Page 194 Chapter 12: Regression to the Mean......Page 216 Chapter 13: Interrelated and Correlated......Page 240 Chapter 14: Discrepancy to Variability......Page 258 Chapter 15: Related to Relativity......Page 278 Chapter 16: Psychometrics and Psychological Tests......Page 298 Chapter 17: The Arts and the Age of the Chip......Page 316 Chapter 18: The Sum of It All......Page 330 Bibliography......Page 338 Index......Page 350