Everything Is Predictable

How Bayesian Statistics Explain Our World

De: Tom Chivers

Narrado por: Tom Chivers

“Bayes’s moment has clearly arrived.” —The Wall Street Journal

A captivating and user-friendly tour of Bayes’s theorem and its global impact on modern life from the acclaimed science writer and author of The Rationalist’s Guide to the Galaxy.

At its simplest, Bayes’s theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. But in Everything Is Predictable, Tom Chivers lays out how it affects every aspect of our lives. He explains why highly accurate screening tests can lead to false positives and how a failure to account for it in court has put innocent people in jail. A cornerstone of rational thought, many argue that Bayes’s theorem is a description of almost everything.

But who was the man who lent his name to this theorem? How did an 18th-century Presbyterian minister and amateur mathematician uncover a theorem that would affect fields as diverse as medicine, law, and artificial intelligence?

Fusing biography, razor-sharp science writing, and intellectual history, Everything Is Predictable is an entertaining tour of Bayes’s theorem and its impact on modern life, showing how a single compelling idea can have far reaching consequences.

©2024 Tom Chivers (P)2024 Simon & Schuster Audio

Hard to listen to

Great book, forced to buy hard copy.
A companion to Bernoulli's Fallacy. Probability theory is used to control how we think, it's always a good idea to investigate why some conclude what they do.

Great explanations of apply Bayesian logic

The author makes Bayesian statistics comprehensible and then goes on to real world applications and some history as to how classical statistics sometimes yields bad science. Great listen.

Great opportunity to ponder...

...how one behaves and how one might be behaving optimally. And the reader performes and reads with proper deference.

The best Bayes overview for layman

Great overview of Bayes - funny and informative. Author does an excellent job narrating his own text. Highly recommend.

Bayes everywhere Now I see him!

The ending or culmination of the book is fantastic. It was presented well with a perfect reading.

Great topic spoken in simple terms!

Great voice. Great content. Wish this author would create more. This text is welcoming to novice minds on the subject matter. It also does a great job giving some historical background. Would love more on free energy theory.

Great listen on Bayes

Loved this book for its content & sprinkling of humor. I’m already a student or Bayesian statistics, complexity theory & AI. So, this listen was right up my alley. It gave me new insights on all these topics, and tied them all together once again. If you are already familiar with Bayesian theory, I highly recommend this listen to get more in depth, novel insights & some practical applications. The material didn’t call for great leaps of narration, so I only gave it 4 stars in that regard. But, the use of humor was a really nice touch.

Excellent book

I was familiar with the subject but this book did a great job explaining it.

The author reads his own work well. His humor is a welcome relief to trying to understanding the concept.

Well worth your time

I was looking forward to this. What a disappointment.

Unfortunately the book is all around underwhelming.

There is not enough thinking and information about Bayes theorem, the narration is dull, everything lacks vibrancy.

The book is extremely meandering.
I forced myself to finish it, because I bought it full price.


I was very motivated to learn about Bayes thinking and the depth of it, in connection to Less Wrong and all the other zeitgeist. Or at least I wanted to be entertained.

I was bitterly disappointed on both counts.