The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

Bayes’s theorem encourages us to be disciplined about how we weigh new information. If our ideas are worthwhile, we ought to be willing to test them by establishing falsifiable hypotheses and subjecting them to a prediction.

Essentially, Bayes’ big insight was that you must add any new information you get to the information you already have. In this case, you don’t have very much information. But it is something. What that means is that instead of just saying, ‘The most likely position of the line is two-fifths of the way along the table,’ you have to take account of y