It’s estimated that human adults make about 35,000 decisions a day — the percentage of good decisions depends on the adult. These choices can be as banal as deciding to roll or crumple toilet paper or ...

Bayes Theorem is the handiwork of an 18th-century minister and statistician named Thomas Bayes, first released in a paper Bayes wrote entitled “An Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of ...

Nate Silver, baseball statistician turned political analyst, gained a lot of attention during the 2012 United States elections when he successfully predicted the outcome of the presidential vote in ...

Bayes' theorem, also called Bayes' rule or Bayesian theorem, is a mathematical formula used to determine the conditional probability of events. The theorem uses the power of statistics and probability ...

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne introduces Bayes’s theorem in her new book with a remark by John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?” Bayes’s theorem, named after ...

Bayes’s core contribution, which Chivers skillfully renders into cogent prose designed to educate the lay reader, is the notion that the likelihood of an event taking place in the future depends, in ...

The past 35 years have seen Bayesian models applied to many areas of the cognitive and brain sciences, which suggests that reasoning and decision-making may be rational. Wishful thinking provides a ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American On our most recent episode of our podcast My ...