The Signal and the Noise

It goes without saying that “popular statistics” book is mostly an oxymoron. On the one hand, statistics is largely a very dry field. On the other hand, those of us who do understand statistics (and even freaks, like my husband, who enjoy statistics), find any attempt at popular statistics largely too elementary to be interesting. Nate Silver doesn't just walk the fine line in the middle, he eliminates it and writes a completely novel statistic book that is appealing to both the mathematician and the math hater: this book fascinates.

Nate Silver focuses on the forecasting in areas that are difficult to predict: weather, climate, earthquakes, poker, politics, chess and sports. Each of these areas is individually interesting – I had never spent much time considering online poker, for instance, and the chapter focusing on poker is not just mathematically-focused, but also an expose on the world of online poker and the life and times (or at least the two year subset thereof) of Silver's 6-figure gambling career. In addition, his overall thesis, which seems to be that we should use Bayesian analysis to think probabilistically about the world and continually evaluate our probabilities both builds naturally and has far-reaching applications.

I feel like I have spent years of my life trying to explain to medical students (and more advanced physicians who should really know better) why every time a paper is published with a p<0.05 we can't totally disregard all prior medical knowledge and dive after the new information. Silver's easy explanation of Bayes' theorem nicely summarizes why this is true - that alone should make this a must-read for anyone in an academic field.