Book review – Page 24 – William M. Briggs

The limits of statistics: black swans and randomness

The author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has penned the essay THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS over at Edge.org…

Book review

Transforming American Military Policy

Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy by Frederick W. Kagan, 2006. Encounter Books. Recommendation: read This book is an excellent accounting of the theories that have gripped…

Book review

Calculated Risks: How to know when numbers deceive you: Gerd Gigerenzer

Gerd Gigerenzer, Simon and Schuster, New York, 310 pp., ISBN 0-7432-0556-1, $25.00 Should healthy women get regular mammograms to screen for breast cancer? The surprising answer, according to this wonderful…

Book review

“The Future of Everything” by David Orrell

The Future of Everything by David Orrell. Thunder's Mouth Press, New York. I wanted to like this book, which was supposed to be an examination of how well scientists made…

Book review Philosophy

The Algebra of Probable Inference: Richard T. Cox

This is a lovely, lovely book and I can't believe it has taken me this long to find and read it (November 2005: I was lead to this book via…

Book review Philosophy

The Rationality of Induction: David Stove

Is deductive logic empirical? No. Is inductive logic also empirical? No. Is induction justified and, if so, is it just an extension of logic? Yes. These are Stove's conclusions as…

dadgervais on Richard Dawkins, The Big Muscles Fallacy & AI PachinkoMay 8, 2026
As I (computer engineer, retired) have always maintained: people who believe in mechanical inteligence suffer from "Clever Hans Syndrome". A…
NLR on Richard Dawkins, The Big Muscles Fallacy & AI PachinkoMay 7, 2026
It appears that Dawkins does not have a well thought out philosophy of consciousness and so he has psyched himself…
jgh on The Red-Blue Button Dilemma & Its Surprising AnswerMay 7, 2026
There's an episode of Golden Balls where one contentant understood how The Prisoners' Dilemma worked and succcessfully tricked his opponent…
Johnno on How Experts Use “Calamities” to Find Official Victims & Gain PowerMay 6, 2026
Hence we descriptively say in plural... a "calamity of victims." Or a "catastrophe of Expurts." Or an "academy of failures."…
Brian (bulaoren) on How Experts Use “Calamities” to Find Official Victims & Gain PowerMay 6, 2026
So, three circumlocutors walk into a bar...