Cromwell

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understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

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Cromwell's Law

Submitted by david on Tue, 05/02/2008 - 11:16am

Cromwell's Rule refers to a principle that you should not give probabilities of 1 to any event that is not demonstrable by logic to be true, and never to give probability 0 to any event unless it can be logically shown to be false - see page 91 of Understanding Uncertainty by Dennis Lindley. It comes from Cromwell's appeal to the Church of Scotland to 'think it possible you may be mistaken'.

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