Chances Are (Hardcover)

Everything is possible, yet only one thing happens": this is the essence of probability, quantifying what could happen. Filmmaker Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan (coauthor of The Art of the Infinite) trace probability back to its original conception in the 1660s (by a gambler, of course) and show how it affected not only science, which would be impossible without it, but also religion and philosophy. Many pioneers of the math that grew into statistics were trying to define the divine; the inventor of combinatorics, for example, was a medieval missionary seeking to convert Muslims by showing that any statement combining the qualities of God was true in the Christian faith. This book rigorously develops its math from first principles with a passion that would make even an amateur heady with the possibilities contained within a bell curve. The authors explore the promise of the math of probabilities through its most powerful modern applications, from determining the effectiveness of new drugs to weighing the merits of combat strategies. In all these cases, the authors place the study of probability firmly in the context of humanity's ongoing struggle to assign meaning to randomness. Never before has statistics been treated with such awe and devotion.

From dice, cards, and coin flips to insurance, weather, and warfare, Kaplan and Kaplan tour the human compulsion to discern order in events governed by randomness. Readers familiar with Peter Bernstein's Against the Gods (1996), a popular history of probability, may find this work too basic, but readers new to the topic are in for an enjoyable treat. Confronted with uncertainty, most people depend on intuition, a very unreliable means for aligning expectation with observation. The authors exploit this foible in their many anecdotes, both in stories about those who fell prey to visceral instinct, and those--usually mathematicians--who tried to assert some predictive control over chance. Allied to the entertaining stories are the theoretical foundations of statistical probability laid down by those mathematicians and physicists, such as Cardano, Pascal, Laplace, and Boltzmann. The authors organize matters overall into subjects such as medical diagnosis, pharmaceutical trials, law, battle, and, of course, wagering. And with their many touches of irony, Kaplan and Kaplan write as intriguingly as their inveigling topic. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

A great subject. Exhilarating ... the authors choose their examples cleverly and explain them through arresting metaphors.

A fascinating layman's trek... stimulating conclusions.

An enjoyable and revealing read aimed at the general reader. Its surprising and ironic conclusions make it anything but predictable.

(already on web page)

We search for certainty, but find only likelihood. All things are possible, only one thing actually happens; everything else is in the realm of probability. The twin disciplines of probability and statistics underpin every modern science and sketch the shape of all purposeful group activity— politics, economics, medicine, law, sports—giving humans a handle on the essential uncertainty of their existence. Yet while we are all aware of the hard facts, most of us still refuse to take account of probability—preferring to drive, not fly; buying into market blips; smoking cigarettes; denying we will ever age.

There are some people, though—gamblers, risk buyers, forensic experts, doctors, strategists— who find probability’s mass of incomplete uncertainties delightful and revelatory. Chances Are is their story. Combining philosophical and historical background with portraits of the men and women who command the forces of probability, this engaging, wide-ranging, and clearly written volume will be welcomed not only by the proven audiences for popular books like E=MC2 and The Golden Ratio but by anyone interested in the workings of fate.

From drawing the queen of spades that will give us a royal flush to planning a picnic that we hope will be favored with a sunny day; from gauging the credibility of a cocksure lawyer to trusting the implausible statistical fact that assures us that it is, in fact, safer to fly than drive, our lives are played out in the arena of chance. However little we recognize it in our day-to-day existence, we are always riding the odds, seeking out certainty but settling, reluctantly, for likelihood; building our beliefs on the shadowy props of probability.

In fact, the twin disciplines of proability and statistics underpin almost every modern science and sketch the shape of most human activities, whether politics, economics, medicine, law, or sports. For gamblers, risk buyers, forensic experts, magicians, artificial intelligence researchers, doctors, or military strategists, probabilitiy's tangle of incomplete certainties presents less a burden than an enthralling challenge. Gazing into apparent chaos, they discern patterns as elegant (and purposeful) as those of a bevy of migrating swans. CHANCES ARE... is their story: a millennia-long search for the tools to manage the recurrent but unpredictable - to help us prevent, or at least mitigate, the seemingly random blows of disaster, disease, and injustice. Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan have written a wonderfully erudite and entertaining account of this search, tracing its course from the Romans' divining the secrets of their dice-based oracles to John Graunt's painstakingly working out the first actuarial tables in plague-scourged London; from the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo to war-gamers calmly destroying armies and nations. In these pages, we meet the brilliant individuals who developed the first abstract formulations of probability as well as the intrepid visionaries who recognized their practical applications - from blackjack to our own mortality.

CHANCES ARE... is a compelling journey through history, mathematics, and philosophy, charting one of humanity's most ambitious and poignant endeavors: the struggle against randomness.

"This important and beautifully written book tells – with humor and insight – the grand story of how humanity, in its ‘endless struggle against randomness,’ grapples with questions such as: What does "the odds" really mean? What is your best strategy if you are a contestant on the television program Let's make a Deal? Can we estimate the risk of being convicted wrongly in a court of law? What is the population of London in 1662?"

– Barry Mazur, Gerhard Gade University Professor, Harvard University, and author of Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen)

Things you will learn in Chances Are…

Why older should mean wiser. When the casino must lose. Why "effective" medicines may not cure you. How to meet the love of your life. Why your broker has to have a swanky office. How to win by losing. Why life doesn’t (usually) run backwards Whether you should believe in God …and what to do if the Queen is coming to your garden party.

Michael Kaplan studied European history at Harvard and Oxford. After a stint as producer/director at WGBH, he has been an award-winning writer and filmmaker working abroad for clients including governments, corporations, museums, and charities. Ellen Kaplan trained as a classical archaeologist and has taught math, biology, Greek, Latin, and history. She and her husband, Robert, run the Math Circle, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to joyous participatory learning, and are the authors of The Art of the Infinite.

CHAPTER 2

Discovering

"Even chance, which seems to hurtle on, unreined, Submits to the bridle and government of law." – Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus, last of the classical minds, whose desperate attempt to summarize all ancient knowledge was cut short by imprisonment, torture and death at the hands of Theodoric the Ostrogoth.)

Anyone can talk to God; it’s getting an answer that’s difficult. Few of us can regularly count on divine guidance, and experience shows that going to an intermediary is not always satisfactory. The Lydian ruler Croesus planned to invade Persia, so he prudently checked with the oracle at Delphi. "If Croesus crosses the Halys, he will destroy a great empire," said the crone in the fume-filled cavern. A true prediction – but the empire was Croesus’ own. Pressed by his enemies, Saul went to the witch of Endor and had her call up the ghost of Samuel. Samuel was hardly helpful: "The Lord hath rent the kingdom out of thine hand, and given it to thy neighbor." The king must have left feeling like a stressed executive told by his doctor to exercise more and eat less. It’s easy to see the appeal of a mechanism that would restrict Destiny to simpler, less irritating answers.

Many things happen unpredictably, on the larger scale (defeats, disasters) and on the smaller (things dropped, things flipped). It is almost a given of human nature to posit a connection between the two scales: between local accident and universal doom. Sortilege – telling fortunes by casting lots or throwing dice – is a tradition that dates back almost without change to before the dawn of writing. Fine cubic ivory dice (with opposite sides adding up to seven, just as in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas) accompanied pharaohs into their tombs. Even then, dice must have been a form of amusement as well as a tool of divination . What, after all, would a pharaoh need to predict in the afterlife? Pausanias, the Baedeker of the ancient world, nicely captures this double role of dice. He describes the great hippodromos at Elis, where, in the jumble of memorials and victory tributes, stood the Three Graces, resplendent in giltwood and ivory, holding a rose, a sprig of myrtle – and a die, "because it is the plaything of youths and maidens, who have nothing of the ugliness of old age." Perhaps that is the secret of this shift of dice from oracle to game: the young are too busy living to be interested in fate; the old know the answer all too well.

Dicing became the universal vice of the Roman aristocracy: the emperor Augustus, otherwise the pattern of self-restraint, spent whole days gambling with his cronies. Claudius wrote a book on dice and had his sedan chair rigged for playing on the move. Caligula, of course, cheated.

Meanwhile, in the dense, whispering forests across the Rhine, the Germans gave themselves completely to gambling – with savage literalness. Tacitus said: "So bold are they about winning or losing, that, when they have gambled away all else, they stake their own freedom on the final throw."

The pure gambling games played in Roman times all seem to have been variants of hazard, the progenitor of modern craps, played with either dice or the knucklebones of sheep. Wherever the Roman armies camped you find hundreds of dice – a fair proportion loaded. In Augustus’s favorite version of hazard the highest throw (all dice showing different faces) was called Venus, appropriately for a pastime that was also a conversation with the gods. But even with the gods, humans seek an edge: Venus was the highest throw, but also the most likely. After all, we don’t go to the temple to add to our bad luck: all divination retains its popularity only as long as it gives a high proportion of favorable answers. And once you know that daisies usually have an odd number of petals, you can get anyone to love you.