Simon Ings

Life among the world’s biggest risk-takers

The billionaires currently driving technology and the global economy are willing to take bets on very long odds, and treat everything as a market to be played

[Getty Images] 
issue 21 September 2024

The Italian actuary Bruno de Finetti, writing in 1931, was explicit: ‘Probability does not exist.’ Probability, it’s true, is simply the measure of an observer’s uncertainty; and in The Art of Uncertainty, the British statistician David Spiegelhalter explains how this extraordinary and much-derided science has evolved to the point where it is even able to say useful things about why matters have turned out the way they have, based purely on present evidence.

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