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The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life
The Strunk & White of statistics team up to help the average person navigate the numbers in the news.
Drawing on their hugely popular BBC Radio 4 show More or Less,, journalist Michael Blastland and internationally known economist Andrew Dilnot delight, amuse, and convert American mathphobes by showing how our everyday experiences make sense of numbers.
The radical premise...more
Drawing on their hugely popular BBC Radio 4 show More or Less,, journalist Michael Blastland and internationally known economist Andrew Dilnot delight, amuse, and convert American mathphobes by showing how our everyday experiences make sense of numbers.
The radical premise...more
Hardcover, 210 pages
Published
December 26th 2008
by Gotham
(first published December 24th 2008)
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The Numbers Game is a fascinating look at statistics and polls. The take home message is that you can't believe everything you read, especially polls, but if you understand how polls are done (how things are counted) you may be better able to cut through the crap. The book contains some truths which are surprising, but probably shouldn't be. For instance, when the government or some organization reports that there are so many of this or that in the country, be it illegal aliens or dogs and cats,...more
This book is based on a popular British show called More or Less in which a writer and an economist try to teach the general public to make sense of the data that swamp us each day. For me, the most valuable part of the book involves the numerous examples of how data have been presented by journalists and politicians to support particular viewpoints. The specific topics covered include making sense of averages, the (over)use of performance measures, assessing risk, making sense of sampling, unde...more
If you've ever been confused or frustrated by statistics, polls, and other numbers you've read about or heard on tv, this book should be on your shelf. Blastland, a journalist, and Andrew Dilnot, a fiscal math expert, explain in simple terms and with interesting and sometimes amusing examples how statistics and other numbers can be manipulated to mean just about anything the creator wants. The authors discuss polls, percentages, graphs and charts, census numbers, mortality and health stats, bud...more
The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, in Life by Michael Blastland and Andrew Bilmont (pp. 210)
A must read book on interpreting numbers presented in our daily headlines by the British men behind the TV program, More or Less. Blastland and Bilmont do a fantastic job of speaking in plain, non-math speak and presenting interesting examples of how stats are often blown out of proportion in our 30 second sound bit culture. Highly acc...more
A must read book on interpreting numbers presented in our daily headlines by the British men behind the TV program, More or Less. Blastland and Bilmont do a fantastic job of speaking in plain, non-math speak and presenting interesting examples of how stats are often blown out of proportion in our 30 second sound bit culture. Highly acc...more
Eric_W
marked it as to-read
I'm looking forward to reading this book. The way the media, and even people who should know better, abuse numbers so as to make real risk assessment very difficult is discouraging. For example, the American Institute of Cancer Research says we should eliminate eating bacon because doing so increases our risk of colorectal cancer by 21%. That is true on the face of it and would appear startling until you ask what the baseline is. About 45 of 1000 men will get that cancer, or about 5 per 100 m...more
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I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads. It's still an honest review, but the FTC wanted you to know...
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The Numbers Game is a great guide to how to understand numbers and how they are used, especially in politics and the news. Blastland and Dilnot use daily-life examples to illustrate statistical principles in a way that is easy to read and even entertaining.
Some of my favorite examples include: describing how a statistical trend is si...more
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The Numbers Game is a great guide to how to understand numbers and how they are used, especially in politics and the news. Blastland and Dilnot use daily-life examples to illustrate statistical principles in a way that is easy to read and even entertaining.
Some of my favorite examples include: describing how a statistical trend is si...more
Good book about the kind of numbers and statistics you see in the news, and how to interpret them properly. For example, if you hear something like "eating a carrot a day doubles your chance of getting liver cancer" that sounds significant. But it could mean that carrots double your chance of cancer from 1/2% to 1%, and news reports rarely specify. Also, it's important to know the accuracy of any medical tests you take. If you have a positive mammogram you still only have about a 10% c...more
Not a bad book but most of the questions asked and answered were pretty obvious. That being said, it was nice to see someone make the answers available in an accessible and coherent manner. Anyone who trusts or doesn't trust statistics should read this book...it'll help both of you think and argue statistics intelligently. Worth the time...but not earth shattering in its presentation, conclusions, or ideology.
For dumb cunts. The technique that the authors repeat endlessly is designed for the kind of small minded idiot who needs numbers explained to them in "human" terms. Sure, authors of this book. Throw away the centuries that we've been spending recently working on expanding the human capacity for abstraction for a bunch of dumb Protestant fucks in Alabama I HATE YOU TWO SO MUCH AFTER READING THIS
Entertaining and common sense review of how statistics work, polls, percentages, averages, and the like. Should be required reading for journalists and politicians. Fascinating and easy to understand. Great if you'd like a refresher on how to think about all the numbers the media throws out in news stories, numbers in commercials, and statistics in political ads.
This book is good guide to interpreting statistics and has little formal mathematics. Guide to interpreting statistics, focusing on appropriate scaling, not confusing an average value with a typical one, definitions required to categorize things for counting, who collects the data, and the perils of expecting one number to tell you all you want to know.
I spend most of my life working with numbers and had read John Allen Paulos Innumeracy a number of years ago (which I am going to reread) so nothing in here was terribly new.
But it was a good review of how most of the world, politicians particularly, just don't get how number is general and statistics in particular operate.
But it was a good review of how most of the world, politicians particularly, just don't get how number is general and statistics in particular operate.
The Numbers Game is a fascinating book about statistics in the media and how they can deceive, confuse and hopefully enlighten. The authors, who host a BBC radio show on the same topic, do a wonderful job collecting examples of statistics and how they can be misleading. Unfortunately, now I trust numbers in the media even less than I did, which wasn't much. I'd highly recommend this to anyone who reads or hears statistics in the media, which is just about everyone.
You can't believe everything you read. Forty-Three percent of all statistics are false, be careful what you read in a health magazine, you might die of a mis-print. All the basis of the book.
Excellent book to get you to understand what the heck is going on when they start slinging numbers at each other. You know when to duck, when to nod and when to sling them back.
Interesting book with lots of examples that both frighten and amuse. However the ideas boil down to: use commmon sense when reading numbers in the news.
Fun book that gets one objectively responding to news claims: "Is that a big number?" "What is the normal incidence? "What is the base line?" "Is that just part of the normal up and down?" "Which group of the average is of interest?" etc.
The Numbers Game tells you about statistics in the news and politics and reveals the truth about the numbers that are thrown at you daily: numbers are plain and simple, but life is not. You will see what a jumbled mess it is to turn life into a nice round number that is (obviously) often wrong. You will be given a better understanding of what those numbers mean, and the tools to scrutinize them at your own will to get to the bottom of things! Because things are not often what they seem.
Enli...more
Enli...more
A little boring, but I've read this stuff before. Would be a good first book for someone to read up on how to understand statistics
an easy to understand introduction to statistics. Never dull and very informative.
Listened to the authors today on NPR
Fascinating & eye-opening
I took way too long reading this book--almost a year! it really is much better than that--very entertaining in describing how important it is to think about the numbers we hear in the media and elsewhere. Great at breaking down the big numbers and making statistics understandable and useful for everyday life. I'm not great at translating from British in head automatically so a lot of things i have to read twice which is probably what took so long :) Great book tho, I recommend it!
Non Fiction
This was an OK book, but I expected more in-depth interpretations and explanations. The people who are confused by the topics covered are probably not interested enough to read the book.
I really enjoyed this book. As a humanities student without much math background, I found this book accessible and easy to read. It deals with how people pervert math and statistics in order to exaggerate claims, sell something, and sow fear. Mathematical literacy seems to be on the decline, and this book does its part to remedy that situation.
So many great new ways to interpret the numbers that are constantly being thrown at us. I really need to reread it to make it completely sink in. A great little book...made me realize how much we, as readers/listeners ingest without really thinking when it comes to gov't reports, media presentations, TV interviews etc.
Like Freakonomics, only it's about "numeracy" - understanding what numbers and statistics really mean, especially statistics that sound big that politicians and doctors use. Like, if the US government decides to spend a sum on health care, how much does that work out for each person living in the US per week?
I enjoyed learning how and why to be skeptical about numbers in the media. Toward the end, though, the tone got a little repetitive and I couldn't stay with it--skimmed the last couple of chapters. Still, I think every journalist and policy-maker should read this book.
Good. Particularly good in confronting the alarmist idiocy of the local U.S. "news" broad cast five or six times a day in a municipality near you.
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