Thinking Statistically – Uri Bram ****

This is a delightful little book (just three chapters) introducing three of the fundamental aspects of statistics that can get us confused: selection bias, edogeneity (effectively missing external factors which are influencing the outcome) and the use of Bayesian statistics, an approach that is very powerful but makes it easy to go astray.

I wouldn’t quite describe this as a popular science book – there are probably rather too many equations – but it is excellent both as providing a bit of understanding for those making use of statistical methods (it’s all too easy to just crank the handle without understanding what you are doing and thereby come up with the wrong results) and as an introduction for the general reader who isn’t put off by a little bit of jargon and equations in what is, nonetheless, a very readable little book.

Thinking Statistically is short enough to read in a couple of hours, and I think it’s a credit to the author that I thought ‘Oh, really, I wanted more!’ when I got to the end. Uri Bram’s aim is to get the reader taking a more statistical viewpoint. Not necessarily wheeling out the statistical big guns every time you make a decision, but at least being aware of the statistical processes you are undergoing mentally, often unconsciously.

If you would like to know a bit more about statistics, but find the whole business a bit baffling, this is a good place to start.

You may wonder what the cover has to do with statistics. So did I. The simple answer is nothing.

Paperback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader. We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard. This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...

Search This Blog