Abstract
O fortune Like the moon Everchanging Rising first Then declining; Hateful life Treats us badly Then with kindness Making sport with our desires, Causing power And poverty alike To melt like ice. Translation of anonymous twelfth- or thirteenth-century Latin lyric, set to music by Carl Orff, to begin Carmina Burana , completed in 1936. Our theory of thinking is intended to help us choose among actions and beliefs. Making such choices obviously often involves estimating the likelihood that various events will occur in the future. Will it rain tomorrow? Will I get the job I applied for? Probability theory is a well-established normative theory that deals with such estimates. The ancient Egyptians played games of chance that involved calculation of probabilities, but the development of modern probability theory began only in the seventeenth century (Hacking, 1975). In part, this development was inspired by the practice of town governments raising money by selling annuities. Miscalculation of the chances of living to various ages left some towns bankrupt. One person who helped solve the problem of how to figure the price of annuities so that the seller makes a profit was Edmund Halley (also famous for discovering the comet that bears his name and for persuading his friend Isaac Newton to publish his work on planetary orbits). Also in the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal and others recognized that probability theory was relevant to everyday beliefs and decisions, not just to games of chance and other repeated events.
Published Version
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