How to Read This Book

How to Read This Book

There are three movements, like a good murder.

Part I — THE AUTOPSY. We lay Sherlock Holmes on the table and open him up to see what actually made him tick. Spoiler: not deduction. Something rarer, riskier, and — in the real world — usually wrong.

Part II — THE RESURRECTION. Having established that the great detective was a beautiful corpse, we go looking for the living science he was a rumour of. Bayes. Forensics that survived peer review. Forecasters who keep score. The machine that dreams in probabilities.

Part III — THE PRACTICE. What a real science of inference asks of you — and what it costs everyone else when the reading eye is turned on the whole species at once.

Read it in order. The jokes are load-bearing.