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A review by george_odera
How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life by Jordan Ellenberg
3.0
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.
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.