POLITICS, extreme weather events, international crises: all instances in which you might feel you would want an expert handling things at the top. Someone experienced and with reasoned judgement would, you might hope, be able to anticipate, or at least handle, the unforeseen.
In (Biteback Publishing), Paul Goodwin reveals just how deeply the forecasting industry has become entwined in our everyday lives. It keeps supermarket shelves full, ensures that call centres are adequately staffed and anticipates demand on the electricity grid.
Yet prediction is far from an exact science. Walking us from the financial crisis of 2007-2008 to the perilous consequences of predicting elections, Goodwin provides a compulsively readable account of both the fallibility and necessity of human forecasters. We are still more likely to judge electoral candidates on appearance than competence, and even those experienced in prediction impart their own bias to algorithmic projections. Forewarned is a fascinating book, and not at all a reassuring one.
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(MIT Press) is an altogether more academic exploration of the forecasting that we are most familiar with. Despite striking advances in meteorology, Robert Hoffman and his co-authors argue that forecasts are most likely to improve not with the arrival of software that can replicate the cognitive processes of human forecasters, but with programs that can model the weather itself with greater accuracy. Forecasting, they insist, remains very much the domain of human reasoning operating in the face of vast volumes of data.
In the 19th century, although meteorology was not yet recognised as a science, the professionalisation of surgery was gathering pace across London. Prior to the advent of anaesthesia and infection control, operations were quite literally a quick and dirty business. In (Allen Lane), Lindsey Fitzharris guides us through the transformation of the profession over the ensuing decades. Through a rich, lively and frequently gory read, we learn how in the Victorian era, the prospect of being operated on was, quite frankly, terrifying, and readers may find themselves in awe of Joseph Lister and his fellow practitioners who, dissatisfied with a post-surgery mortality rate that hovered around 20 per cent, crafted an expert, caring and entirely safer practice out of what was barely more than blind experiment and butchery.
鈥淓ven those experienced in prediction impart their own bias to algorithmic projections鈥�
No wonder Charles Darwin couldn鈥檛 stomach the operating theatre, and gave up an early foray into medicine. A career of extensive nautical voyages followed, but as James Costa explains in (W. W. Norton), Darwin鈥檚 expert knowledge of the natural world derived largely from his incessant questioning and experimentation at his own home. Costa appends a do-it-yourself guide to some of his experiments. Darwin frequently recruited his children to assist 鈥� although floating seeds across salt water for several weeks, for instance, may not hold quite the fascination for today鈥檚 aspiring scientists that it did then.
In (Bloomsbury Publishing), Brenda Maddox evaluates an altogether less ordered rise in expertise, in this case Britain鈥檚 鈥済entlemen geologists鈥� of the 18th and 19th centuries. There were women among them, including novelist George Eliot and the 鈥渕other of palaeontology鈥� Mary Anning, but the early practitioners were mostly wealthy men who were not that concerned with scientific enquiry. The search for coal seams and scientific evidence of biblical events such as the great flood proved far greater motivators.
Though somewhat defeated by a tendency to skip about, alighting on one historical figure only to jump back in time to another, and another, Maddox has assembled a keenly interesting account of an era in which the balance of knowledge (and consequently power) began to shift away from the church and into the hands of the public 鈥� or at least, an affluent quarter of it.
Figuring out a topic from scratch is no easy matter. Little Ways to Live a Big Life, a new series from publishers Quercus, imparts some limited expertise in under 60 pages on subjects ranging from drawing to playing the piano and from counting to infinity.
The usefulness of such slim volumes in the age of Wikipedia is questionable, but there鈥檚 much to be said for brevity, and James Rhodes鈥檚 piano guide is certainly welcoming and easy to follow. is the most enjoyable volume so far and (thankfully) the one least likely to come in handy. The author, British Airways鈥檚 senior first officer Mark Vanhoenacker, ensures that readers will never look at an approaching runway in quite the same way again.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淗urrah for experts鈥�