kuniga.me > Books > How Not To Be Wrong

How Not To Be Wrong

How Not To Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg. My initial assumption from the title of the book was that it’s about using math to win arguments. The book is more on how to avoid fallacies, especially in probability and statistics, where our intuition is often wrong. The book covers many real-life topics including p-hacking, fair voting, correlation vs. causation, lotteries. I especially liked the topic on Buffon’s needle, so much so I decided to write a post about it.

I came out from this book a bit more cynical about medical experiments. It seems like besides lack of causality there’s a lot of statistical flukes that are hard to catch, so there’s a lot of noise coming from them.

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This entry was parsed from an older retrospective post.