Renowned statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter explores how we can better deal with risk, uncertainty, luck, chance and ignorance.
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This talk was recorded at the Ri on 30 January 2025.
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Life is uncertain. We are all the result of an unforeseen and unforeseeable sequence of small occurrences. But what underlies this fragile chain of events? Is it random or just complex? And what role does luck play in our lives?
Uncertainty is a relationship between the observer and an object in the outside world. In the first Discourse of 2025, kickstarting the Discover 200 celebrations, renowned statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter explains how we can express this numerically and then update our beliefs about the future in the face of constantly changing experience. Exploring the principles of probability, a field that informs annuities, pandemics and climate change, he will examine the limitations of statistical modelling and ask when we need to have the humility to admit our ignorance.
David has spent his career dissecting data in order to help understand uncertainty and assess the chances of what might happen. In this talk, he draws on a wide range of examples to give us a window onto how we can all do this better.
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Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge. He was knighted in 2014 for services to medical statistics, was President of the Royal Statistical Society (2017-2018) and became a Non-Executive Director of the UK Statistics Authority in 2020. His bestselling book The Art of Statistics has been published in eleven languages.
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