I read the preface and there are things I agree with and things I find problematic depending on how the author goes about explaining them. The major one of these last is the seeming identity of probability with randomness.<p>Statistics and probability are tools humans use to predict <i>outcomes</i> of the world, they are not necessarily accurate reflections of the <i>mechanisms</i> of the world. Maybe I'm strawmanning the author here, I don't know. I may read the full book at some point but probably not yet.<p>There may very well be a limit where events are random (such as particle decay), but surely even fully determined events can have probabilistic outcomes, when aggregated. Like say you have 4 beads, 3 black and 1 white. And you non-blindly align all combinations of three beads. You'll have four combinations, three of which contain a white bead. So the probabilistic odds of any one combination of three beads containing a white bead is 75%. If a person picks three beads based on preference, another person can say that there's a 75% chance that those three beads will contain a white bead, iterated over enough picks. But the actual picking for all picks is fully determined by the current preference of the person picking the three beads.