The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction

by Nate Silver

The argument made by Bayes and Price is not that the world is intrinsically probabilistic or uncertain. Bayes was a believer in divine perfection; he was also an advocate of Isaac Newton’s work, which had seemed to suggest that nature follows regular and predictable laws. It is, rather, a statement—expressed both mathematically and philosophically—about how we learn about the universe: that we learn about it through approximation, getting closer and closer to the truth as we gather more evidence. This contrasted25 with the more skeptical viewpoint of the Scottish philosopher David Hume, who argued that since we could not be certain that the sun would rise again, a prediction that it would was inherently no more rational than one that it wouldn’t.26 The Bayesian viewpoint, instead, regards rationality as a probabilistic matter.