From âone of the great (greatest?) contemporary popular writers on economicsâ (Tyler Cowen) comes a smart, lively, and encouraging rethinking of how to use statistics.
Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. Thatâs a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldnât be suspicious of statisticsâwe need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often âthe only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.â If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearlyâunderstanding how our own preconceptions lead us astrayâstatistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter.
As âperhaps the best popular economics writer in the worldâ (New Statesman), Tim Harford is an expert at taking complicated ideas and untangling them for millions of readers. In The Data Detective, he uses new research in science and psychology to set out ten strategies for using statistics to erase our biases and replace them with new ideas that use virtues like patience, curiosity, and good sense to better understand ourselves and the world. As a result, The Data Detective is a big-idea book about statistics and human behavior that is fresh, unexpected, and insightful
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