What I Read in September 2026

A solid Poirot, although rather a sad story. Poirot didn't actually figure that much in the story here, and it mostly rolled along without his presence. I was curious about how the TV adaptation worked in this regard, and it is mostly similar, although included a hilarious montage of Poirot looking Very Serious.

My annual Tolkien reread resumed with The Hobbit. As usual it was a delightful and whimsical adventure.

This was absolutely fascinating. The core of the book is a history of the philosophy of probability, moving from Frequentism to Bayesianism. Joque digs into the metaphysical foundations of how probability and statistics are mapped onto the real world, and how the abstractions they build are justified.

The thesis of the book is that neither Frequentism nor Bayesianism have a metaphysical foundation which allows for a just world: Frequentism is based on a myopic, individualist perspective on truth, while Bayesianism is built upon the pragmatics of capitalist exchange. In order to create abstractions that can serve us all, we need a new abstraction on which to base our knowledge. I found this discussion really interesting, but not entirely convincing. I can't help but feel that the metaphysical basis of probability is largely orthogonal to its use. Perhaps something went over my head, though.

The path to this thesis was filled with thought-provoking diversions. The early discussion on the power of shared abstractions and the limitations of merely breaking them down (which the book calls dereification) was brilliant. I also found the idea of scaled Bayesian inference by private firms for profit being "the enclosure of knowledge" convincing.

One shortcoming with the work to my eyes was that there was no expansion on what a "revolutionary mathematics" would look like. Perhaps this is somewhat unfair, though, as the creation of such a thing is an undertaking beyond the scope of the book.

I was glad to see R. A. Fisher getting called out for being a giant racist when his work inevitably came up in the Frequentist section. His dedication to the eugenics movement alone shows there must be some flaw in Frequentism. The idea is repugnant enough to work as a reductio ad absurdum for the foundation to me – if you're drawing such conclusions, there must be some flaw in your thinking.

Highly recommended for people interested in the foundations of probability.