A wide-ranging study on separating facts from fiction, truth from lies, and evidence from presumptions.
A data specialist investigates the long search for truth and certainty.
We live in an era of fake news, bickering experts, and information overload. This raises a key question: How do we know what to believe? Kucharski is a mathematician who specializes in epidemiology, and his 2020 book The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread—And Why They Stop brought together his expertise in trend analysis, social behavior, and disease treatment. In his new book, he casts a broader net, aiming to establish how truth is uncovered in science, law, politics, philosophy, and many other areas of human endeavor. He starts with Euclid and other classical thinkers who tried to find universal truths through the principles of mathematics and geometry, and he explains how their concepts provided the foundations of Western logic and rationalism. The development of calculus added another dimension. But all these ideas broke down in the face of increasing social complexity and new discoveries. Computer models and algorithms seemed to offer solutions but were eventually revealed as prone to bias, errors, and data limitations. Kucharski does a good job of exposing the flaws in these approaches and sees the “unknown unknowns” as the main obstacle on the path to truth. The book does not offer much advice about how to extract nuggets of truth from mountains of verbiage, but the best option, the author says, is to keep an open mind. He concludes: “We must seek out every useful fragment of data, gather every relevant tool, searching wider and climbing further. Finding the good foundations among the bad. Dodging dogma and falsehoods. Then perhaps, just perhaps, we’ll reach the truth in time.”
A wide-ranging study on separating facts from fiction, truth from lies, and evidence from presumptions.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781541606692
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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