The boringest of backgrounds for the trippiest of cover designs.
Author: David Spiegelhalter
Publication: 2019
Genre: Nonfiction
I finished this one back in July but I’m just getting around to finishing this post. I’ll be honest, when I purchased this book I was hoping it would help me with my own work. It didn’t do that, exactly, but it has helped me become a more informed citizen. One could always use the reminder to consume media critically. I hadn’t thought much about statistics since my high school AP course, but there were a lot of important concepts that I plan to keep in mind in the future. (Failing to disprove the null hypothesis is not proving the null hypothesis!)
The author comes across as a bit of a grandad, in an endearing way. I enjoyed his choice of examples from the whimsical to the deadly serious. I do wish the author had included an equation or two, explained, in the appropriate place. As a mathematically literate person, on occasion I found myself having to refer to the end matter to have any idea what the author really meant.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed it, and I recommend it as a casual dip in to the math that attempts to explain our daily lives.