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The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday Life
Gerd Gigerenzer,Zeno G. Swijtink,Theodore M. Porter,Lorraine Daston,John Beatty,Lorenz Krüger +5 more
TLDR
This paper presents a probabilistic revolution in physics through the lens of inference, arguing that numbers rule the world and Chance and life: controversies in modern biology is a major controversy.Abstract:
The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines.read more
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Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research
TL;DR: For instance, King, Keohane, Verba, and Verba as mentioned in this paper have developed a unified approach to valid descriptive and causal inference in qualitative research, where numerical measurement is either impossible or undesirable.
Journal ArticleDOI
Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises:
TL;DR: Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a h...
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Maps of Bounded Rationality: Psychology for Behavioral Economics
TL;DR: Kahneman as mentioned in this paper made a statement based on worked out together with Shane Federik the quirkiness of human judgment, which was later used in his speech at the Nobel Prize in economics.
Book
Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart
Gerd Gigerenzer,Peter M. Todd +1 more
TL;DR: Fast and frugal heuristics as discussed by the authors are simple rules for making decisions with realistic mental resources and can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality.
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Political power beyond the State: problematics of government
Nikolas Rose,Peter Miller +1 more
TL;DR: This paper argues against an overvaluation of the 'problem of the State' in political debate and social theory and demonstrates that the analytical language structured by the philosophical opposition of state and civil society is unable to comprehend contemporary transformations in modes of exercise of political power.