As luck would have it nothing in this world is certain accept death, taxes and uncertainty. From Breakfast to AI replacing human, the human condition is full of uncertainty. Britain’s most eminent statistician, David Spiegelhalter believes “ is all about us, but, like the air we breathe, it tends to remain unexamined.”

His previous book in 2019, The Art of Statistics was a bestseller, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Cambridge university emeritus professor of statistics acquired national treasure status as he helped an anxious nation to interpret the data.

For over 5000 years from Greek to Mongolia humanity had fancied a flutter. Around 1550 Gerolamo Cardano, who made and lost plenty of money gambling, distilled his accumulated wisdom into The Book of Games of Chance, where he presented the first systematic computation of probabilities, listing all 36 basic outcomes with the roll of one dice and another, which enabled even a 11-year-old school student to replicate this.

In engaging, crystal-clear prose, he takes us through the principles of probability, showing how it can help us think more analytically about everything from medical advice to pandemics and climate change forecasts, and explores how we can update our beliefs about the future in the face of constantly changing experience. Along the way, he explains why roughly 40% of football results come down to luck rather than talent, how the National Risk Register assesses near-term risks to the United Kingdom, and why we can be so confident that two properly shuffled packs of cards have never, ever been in the exact same order.

The story of Casanova’s mathematical prowess led to an extraordinarily successful  French lottery, or how Halley comet  essentially invented the life insurance and annuity industry by observing ages of when people died.

In 1961, President Kennedy was informed of the potential Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba had a fair chance of success. The chiefs of staff were sceptical  about the invasion  proposal and actually  gave it a 30 per cent probability of success. But the brigadier translated  this into a fair chance  by which he actually meant “not too good”. Disasters such as this illustrate the dangers of using words to express magnitude . A 2019 Nato technical report titled Variants of Vague Verbiage, highlights how for UK intelligence likely means  55 to 75 per  cent  where as for Canada it is 70 to 80 per cent.

Forecasting  predicting election outcomes, investment decisions or disease outbreaks often involves statistical models trying to quantify both low probabilities and high impacts.

The chance of winning the UK lottery is about one in 45 million. So an event with a probability of one in 10to the power of 135 is similar to winning this jackpot seventeen times on the bounce.

Uncertainty means none of us should feel we have to speak with absolute and unchanging conviction. “Each of us wouldn’t be here were it not for a chain of apparently fortuitous occurrances”

 The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck by David Spiegelhalter, Pelican £22, 512 pages.