"Probability opens doors for us and then trips us up. With a handful of simple concepts and definitions, it brings a whole world of problems more under our control but also makes us vulnerable to fallacies we otherwise might never have considered. It is perhaps the defining logic of our time, an era when more and more of our decision-making is based on data and statistical analysis. The Age of Information is often also the Age of Incomplete and Contradictory Information, and the various information sources we depend on are frequently misleading or full of holes.
Probability is ultimately nothing more than a codification of our ability to reason with less than perfect information, as we are constantly required to do. Data is wonderful to have, but data can also be manipulated and distorted to tell a story that isnāt true or to suggest certainty where really there is none. Probability can be the antidote. It reminds usāor perhaps provides the language with which we remind ourselvesāof the boundaries of our understanding, and it keeps us conscious of the fact that abundant data is not the same thing as knowledge. The era of Big Data must also therefore be an era of Big Probability.
But first we need to understand what weāre doing."
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