(p. A13) Adam Kucharski, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the history of what has counted as proof.
. . .
What should we do, . . ., when a mathematical proof of truth is unavailable, but we must nonetheless act?
This leads us to a discussion of probability and statistics, and of pioneers such as William Gosset, a brewer at Guinness who figured out how to quantify random errors in experiments, and Janet Lane-Claypon, an English scientist who first thought to investigate confounding factors while analyzing children’s health. Some innovations, though, have hardened into unhelpful dogma. The scientific notion of “statistical significance” relies, Mr. Kucharski explains, on a wholly arbitrary cutoff, which incentivizes researchers to massage their data. Such issues, he says, can be hard for scientists, let alone the laity, to understand.
Mr. Kucharski speaks from experience, since he was one of the experts first called upon by the British government for advice on the Covid-19 pandemic. He explains brilliantly the fragmentary and confusing nature of the data then available, and the provisional conclusions they led to. As a public face of this effort, Mr. Kucharski was bombarded daily with abusive and threatening messages from angry citizens who simply didn’t believe what they were being told.
The lesson Mr. Kucharski draws isn’t that he and his colleagues were right (though they largely were), but that bureaucratic authorities erred in pretending there was certainty when all that was possible at the time was messy and provisional. Notoriously, in March 2020 the World Health Organization tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airbone.” (As it turns out, it was, and it is.) The author regrets, too, that politicians claimed to be “following the science,” because science can never tell you what you should do.
For the full review see:
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 5, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Proof’: Finding Truth in Numbers.”)
The book under review is:
Kucharski, Adam. Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. New York: Basic Books, 2025.