Skip to main content

How to Make the World Add Up - Tim Harford ****

Many UK listeners will be familiar with the BBC's excellent More or Less radio show, hosted by the Financial Times' 'undercover economist' Tim Harford. The programme takes on numbers in the news to explain them and, where necessary, show what's wrong with them, in a light but informative fashion. The only slight problem with the programme is that it does tend towards silly presentation styles (though the last couple of years these have been toned down). On his own, Tim Harford is perhaps less fun and more serious in style, but remains approachable on a subject that most of us ought to understand better.

One of the most enjoyable things in the field is to shoot down misuse of stats. It's certainly an important thing to do, but Harford points out that only doing this, while entertaining, is potentially dangerous as it may lead to a total detachment from the usefulness of statistics. Instead, he suggests, we need to get better about thinking about the numbers we are bombarded with in our lives, so that we can most sensibly make use of what we are being told.

The approach in the book, in the fashionable 'ten rules' style, gives us a series of statistical 'commandments' such as being aware of our emotional response to data to avoid simply reacting based on emotion, or finding appropriate context, or being aware that facts can change. For each of the ten we are given examples, mostly historical, though all interesting. It's a shame in a way that the book was finished in March, so we get a few initial thoughts on by far the biggest statistical impact on lives in 2020 - the coronavirus pandemic - but it was too soon to have in-depth examples from this.

In the final chapter, Harford condenses all his commandments in New Testament style into simpler guidance that encompasses the rest - be curious. It is curiosity that inspires us to explore the statistics we are given - and to question them effectively when they need questioning, rather than simply dismissing them as fake news or accepting them as indisputable fact.

If you want guidance on what's really happening in the numbers we see, it's impossible to beat David Spiegelhalter's magisterial The Art of Statistics. But if you want to discover the best mindset to appreciate statistics, make the most of them and find where it's necessary to ask more and doubt the outcome, then Harford, through How to Make the World Add Up, is an ideal guide.

I'm reminded in a way of Brian Cox's popular science titles written with Jeff Forshaw, such as The Quantum Universe. If the fans of Cox's fluffy TV documentaries were to pick up one of these books (as no doubt many did), they would find it a lot harder going that the TV shows, but more intellectually rewarding. There's not quite such a disparity between Harford's book and More or Less - but listeners will find it less of an educational entertainment and more of an educative read.

Hardback:    
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Luna: Moon Rising (SF) - Ian McDonald ****

I'm not the natural audience for this book. Game of Thrones l eaves me cold - and it's hard not to feel the influence of GoT (and a whole lot of Dune )   underneath a veneer of science fiction and the trappings of a South American drug cartel in the cod-medieval family power battles and chivalric details. There are even dragons (of a sort). I'd be really sad if the future did involve this sort of throwback feudalism. However, remarkably, despite this I found Luna: Moon Rising kept me engaged. The fact is that Ian McDonald can put together a good plot with intricate machinations, which is enough to carry the reader through what can be a bewildering collection of characters. The two page scene-setter saying who did what to whom at the start was useful, but I could have done with family trees for the main family as I was constantly forgetting who was who - especially easy as McDonald endows many families with characters with the same first initial (e.g. Ariel and Al...
Post a Comment
Read more

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...
Post a Comment
Read more

E=mc2: A biography of the world’s most famous equation – David Bodanis *****

David Bodanis is a storyteller, and he fulfils this role with flair in E=mc2. The premise of the book is simple – Einstein himself has been biographed (biographised?) to death, but no one has picked out this most famous of equations, dusted it down and told us what it means, where it comes from and what it has delivered. Allegedly, Bodanis was inspired to write the book after hearing see an interview with actress Cameron Diaz in which she commented that she’d really like to know what that famous collection of letters was all about. Although the book had been around for a while already when this review was written (September 2005), it seemed a very apt moment to cover it, as the equation is, as I write, exactly 100 years old. So when better to have a biography? Bodanis starts off by telling us about the individual elements of the equation. What the different letters mean, where the equal sign comes from and so on. This is entertaining, though he seems to tire of the approach on...
Post a Comment
Read more