PROOF

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.