William M. Briggs is a Senior Contributor to The Stream. Author of Uncertainty, he is a writer, philosopher, and itinerant scientist living on a small but densely populated island in the Atlantic Ocean. He earned his Ph.D. from Cornell University in statistics. He studies the philosophy of science, the use and misuses of uncertainty, the corruption of science, and the uselessness of most predictions. He began life as a cryptologist for the Air Force, slipped into weather and climate forecasting, and matured into an epistemologist. He maintains an active and lively blog at wmbriggs.com.
The monumental importance of the election was made vivid in, of all places, a Manhattan elevator. There were four or five of us crammed in. As we descended somebody said, “My wife and daughters found out that I was going…
