An entertainment for numerate readers and a user-friendly introduction to statistics for beginners.
“Understanding causation is tough even with good statistics, but hopeless without them.” British economist and historian Harford crunches the numbers and finds us gullible—but corrigible.
Regarding the 1954 bestseller How To Lie With Statistics, Harford finds it overly cynical: “What does it say about statistics—and about us—that the most successful book on the subject is, from cover to cover, a warning about misinformation?” It’s a pregnant question, because of course people lie with numbers; indeed, the very author of that earlier book was pressed into service by the tobacco industry to prove that there was no link between smoking and cancer. Thankfully, notes Harford, British medical researchers worked out the smoking numbers for themselves, with the result that “doctors became the first identifiable social group in the UK to give up smoking in large numbers.” (This was years before the Surgeon General’s report in the U.S.) As the author rightly notes, there’s no reason to mistrust numbers, but we must interrogate them better, adopting the hopeful, forward vision of those researchers in the place of industry flunkies. True, there are all kinds of ways in which even the best prepared of us can overlook the truth that the numbers reveal. There’s a wishful-thinking bias called “motivated reasoning,” as well as the “powerful illusion” of “naive realism” by which we project our thinking onto the world and wonder why it doesn’t behave according to our rules. Harford also delves into “premature enumeration,” where we look at the numbers without quite understanding the questions we’re asking of them. Defending the process of polling and decrying the totalitarian habit of certain politicians to invent their own numbers, Harford lays out 10 commandments of examining statistics—e.g., ask tough questions about the data, be aware that something may be missing—along with a worthy “golden rule” : “Be curious.”
An entertainment for numerate readers and a user-friendly introduction to statistics for beginners.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-08459-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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