Full disclosure: I'm not a math person whatsoever, but I still found Spiegelhalter's book to be engaging. It takes an in-depth look at probability: what it means, what it doesn't mean, but more importantly it's relation to our experience of it vis a vis encounters with uncertainty. The chapters with more complex calculations were mostly lost on me though I get the feeling that the mathematically inclined would find it a delicious visualization of the equations underpinning Spiegelhalter's writing. He talks about theorists and theories that inform probability and subsequent philosophical reckonings with objectivity-subjectivity. For example, how can probability be an objective (i.e. naturally occurring aspect of the known world), when at a quantum physics level it is a subjective quantification? I appreciated this kind of questioning of the field of probability itself. It had a tempering effect on the sense that probability is a fixed state such as a law of the universe, rather than an experience that we've made some mathematical sense of. He also talks about coincidences and for the social scientists among us, that contains some great information where it meets with concepts of random sample sizes and outcomes (where coincidence is the hypothesized outcome).

The best books leave us with more questions than answers (at least for quite a few genres of non-fiction). While reading a found myself wondering about what probability will look like in the coming eras of generative AI whose role is largely data aggregation and subsequent modeling that is a form of probability. If it doesn't quite exist at that mathematical quantum level, what can we make of generative AI and other technological injectures into its fields? Also, generally speaking, I was left with a reverence and much awe for mathematicians whose career is dancing through these incredibly dense equations and philosophical possibilities. It certainly is an art and I didn't expect to enjoy The Art of Uncertainty as much as I did.

The book is great for fans of Malcolm Gladwell-style writing, computer science interests, and tangential industries that rely on probability tipped in its favour: marketing, management, artificial intelligence, a/b testing for websites, sales, and more.