3.5 star rating.

Great book overrall, with invaluable nuggets of mathematical thinking. Ellenberg does a valiant job of explaining, using real-life examples, of mathematical concepts of linearity, inference, expectation & probability, regression, and existence.

Nonetheless, the biggest shortcoming of the book is that its title is a misnomer. For every one page of signal, How Not To Be Wrong has two pages of noise. Ellenberg inundates the reader with a lot of abstract information that serve no other purpose other than making the book a tard too hard to follow. One starts the book with the expectation of applied and recreational mathematics, but in many sections of the book the author makes an excursion into pure mathematics. The effect is that there's frustratingly only a sporadic flow of the book. At many sections of the book the reader feels as if Ellenberg is soliloquising yet hoping that you are following his esoteric line of thinking. Brevity would do a great deal of justice to the title of the book.
Additionally, Ellenberg writes on the assumption that the reader has prior knowledge of some of the mathematical concepts. For instance, the book started talking about p-values without any explanation of how they are derived from samples. At times, I felt like I was reading a maths textbook rather than a nonfiction book. I was lucky to have read Charles Wheelan's Naked Statistics prior, which does a stupendous job of explaining concepts which Ellenberg overlooked.

In all, I was satisfied that the book canvassed various disciplines in explaining the concepts, from economics to finance, warfare, politics, scientific research, law, and philosophy. Save for my reservations about the book, it is a worthy read.

This book is kinda like the Freakonomics of math. It does a really interesting job of showing you ways mathematical thinking can apply to real-life situations. A lot of the math is surprisingly complex but the author does a really good job of explaining it for non-math people like myself. :-)

a great book full of fascinating ideas.

the core ideas are based on maths but don't let it put you off because the book isn't full of pages of numbers.

the book is well written and accesible for non maths people.

the ideas and personal triumphs of the individuals mentioned in the book are interesting and motivating.

my copy is full of notes and highlighting, which is a good sign

Книга змушує задуматися над фундаментальними істинами, чи вони такі вже й правильні і непохитні як ми звикли думати. Читається довго, особливо коли потрібно вникати в обчислення. Але воно того варте. Автор пише так, що після напружених роздумів слідує декілька сторінок легких розповідей. Було дуже цікаво зазирнути у світ математиків та їх буденні проблеми.
В кризі багато прикладів з американської політичної системи і це трішки демотивувало читати. Як би суть пояснень зрозуміла, але імена здебільшого ні про що мені не говорять. Повністю книгу радити не можу, а от деякі розділи точно сподобаються багатьом, наприклад про те як вигравати у лотереї або про те що площу круга ми обчислюємо як площу багатогранника з безліччю сторін. Особливо цікаво було читати про те, як по-різному можна подати статистичні дані та про те як оцінюється статистична значимість наукових досліджень.

Needed more maths and less social science commentary.

"The freakononics of math." I really enjoyed this book and think it may have made me a better and more informed person. Sometimes it becomes hard to understand and digest the more complex pieces, but overall it's very readable and really funny at times.

Bleh. I was NOT smart enough for this book! I thought it looked interesting and would have some cool insights into practical applications of math and statistics and such. Then 75% of the book ended up being proofs (simplified, of course) of the topics he was talking about and it was just way too much. The “real-world” applications weren’t interesting enough to make it worth it.

Then, I started comparing it to Thinking Fast and Slow, which has a similar vibe but from a behavioral economics standpoint instead of pure math. Compared to that, there was no point at all of reading this book.