Today’s revolutionary idea is something a bit different: David talks to statistician David Spiegelhalter about how an eighteenth-century theory of probability emerged from relative obscurity in the twentieth century to reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between past, present and future. What was Thomas Bayes’s original idea about doing probability in reverse: from effect to cause? What happened when this way of thinking passed through the vortex of the French Revolution? How has it come to lie behind recent innovations in political polling, AI, self-driving cars, medical research and so much more? Why does it remain controversial to this day?

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Next time: 1848: The Liberal Revolution w/Chris Clark

Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network

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