Everything Is Predictable

Tom Chivers takes Bayes' theorem — an eighteenth-century clergyman's equation for updating beliefs as new evidence arrives — and argues it's quietly the operating logic behind everything from spam filters to how doctors should read test results to how we ought to reason about our own convictions. The best sections work through concrete cases (medical diagnosis, forensic evidence, the reliability of eyewitnesses) that make the abstract math legible without dumbing it down. Where the book is more contestable is in its larger claim that a Bayesian mindset should reshape everyday decision-making generally; critics have pushed back that plenty of real uncertainty resists being cleanly quantified into priors and likelihoods. Still, as an explainer of why a 200-year-old statistical idea now underpins so much of modern life, it's unusually lucid.