Proof
The Uncertain Science of Certainty
Adam Kucharski
Having read it
★★★★☆
A decent read with good historical and insightful context in and around the mathematical concepts but I ended up skipping and skimming from about chapter five (of eight, which itself is the shortest at just eight pages!) to its end, realising I would not really miss much.
A good passage
[...] the idealised search for scientific truth collided with the urgency of decision-making and practical constraints in the real world. Questions arrived quickly, and with them demand for answers. Fragments of information had to be gathered, combined, weighed, then acted upon. Evidence would clash with egos, while perfection would strain against pragmatism.
A second good passage
To navigate proof, we must reach into a thicket of errors and biases. We must confront monsters and embrace uncer-tainty, balancing – and rebalancing – our beliefs. We must seek out every useful fragment of data, gather every relevant tool, searching wider and climbing further. Finding the good foundations among the bad. Dodging dogma and falsehoods. Questioning. Measuring. Triangulating. Convincing. Then perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll reach the truth in time.