`Author:` Ian Hacking ## Summary _The Taming of Chance_ (1990) is Ian Hacking's history of how chance stopped being an enemy and became an instrument. It follows the transformation of probability in the nineteenth century: from a theory about dice and wagers into an "avalanche of printed numbers" — the statistical offices of the new nation states counting crime, suicide, marriage, disease — and out the other side into statistical laws of society. Between roughly 1820 and 1900, determinism eroded and something stranger took its place: regularities with no underlying necessity, "laws of statistical law" that no one willed and nothing caused, yet that held with eerie fidelity. The deepest point of the book is that this was not merely the discovery of statistics but the *making* of a new kind of world. Once suicide rates or crime rates exist as stable social facts, society becomes the kind of thing that can have laws of its own — Quetelet's "average man", Durkheim's social facts, and eventually the politics of populations. Chance was tamed by being counted, and counting changed what there was to be counted. Hacking follows his own _The Emergence of Probability_ (1975), which covers the seventeenth-century origins; this is the nineteenth-century continuation of that story. ## Making Up People The essay the podcast mentions, _Making Up People_ (first given in 1986), is the ethical sequel to all this. Its question: what happens when the categories of the human sciences — the kinds of people statistics invents — meet the people themselves? Hacking's answer is **dynamic nominalism**: once a kind of person is named and counted, people can come to be that kind, and the kind moves to fit them. Classifications of people do not describe the world; they help create it. The "looping effect" between category and classified is why human kinds are never finished — and why statistics, the instrument of the taming of chance, is also the instrument by which new kinds of people are made. ## On the podcast > There's a great book called The Teaming of Chance by Ian Hacking, which kind of goes through, he has a bunch of books on this, kind of like the history of statistics and probability. And he has a, there's also Making Up People, which is sort of the like, how categorization of social behaviors and all that comes to shape actual subjects and all this stuff. From TRUE ANON TRUTH FEED: Episode 580: Sexual Harry Potter, 30 Sep 2026: [podcast.apple.com](https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/true-anon-truth-feed/id1474001390?i=1000792431681&r=4211) (The title is _The Taming of Chance_; the speaker's "teaming" is an audible slip.) ## Themes - The avalanche of printed numbers: state statistics as the material from which statistical law was made - The erosion of determinism and its replacement by statistical regularity - Society becoming statistical: average men, social facts, the politics of populations - Human kinds and looping effects: how classifications of people shape the classified - The irony of taming: chance, once measured, produced a new determinism of the "normal" --- `Concepts:` [[Statistics]] · [[Determinism]] · [[The Normal]] `Knowledge Base:` [[Michel Foucault]] · [[Foucault’s Genealogical Method]]