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Allen B. Downey

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Allen Downey is a Professor Emeritus at Olin College and the author of a series of freetextbooks related to software and data science, including Think Python, Think Bayes, and Think Complexity, which are also published by O’Reilly Media. His blog, Probably Overthinking It, features articles on Bayesian probability and statistics. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from U.C. Berkeley, and M.S. and B.S. degrees from MIT.

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Allen B. Downey's Blog: Probably Overthinking It

Who Is More Trusting: Liberals or Conservatives?

When I go crawling around in data from the General Social Survey, sooner or later I run into Ryan Burge, who writes Graphs About Religion. In his most recent post, he wrote about changes in interpersonal trust, as measured by this GSS question:

Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?

Among other analyses, he looks

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Allen B. Downey’s books

Average rating: 4.0 · 3,275 ratings · 395 reviews · 37 distinct works • Similar authors

	Think Python 4.13 avg rating — 1,678 ratings — 57 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Think Stats 3.65 avg rating — 466 ratings — published 2011 — 27 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Think Bayes: Bayesian Statistics in Python 3.94 avg rating — 287 ratings — published 2012 — 14 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Think Complexity: Complexity Science and Computational Modeling 3.91 avg rating — 245 ratings — published 2009 — 13 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Think Java: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist 3.91 avg rating — 169 ratings — published 2016 — 19 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Probably Overthinking It: How to Use Data to Answer Questions, Avoid Statistical Traps, and Make Better Decisions 4.17 avg rating — 106 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Little Book of Semaphores: The Ins and Outs of Concurrency Control and Common Mistakes 4.40 avg rating — 81 ratings — published 2009	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Think DSP: Digital Signal Processing in Python really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 45 ratings — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Think Data Structures: Algorithms and Information Retrieval in Java 3.46 avg rating — 37 ratings — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Think OS: A Brief Introduction to Operating Systems really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 29 ratings — published 2014 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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After the Fall

by Edward Ashton (Goodreads Author)

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May 28, 2026 03:00PM

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Every Tool's a Hammer: Life Is What You Make It

by Adam Savage

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May 22, 2026 07:06PM

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Allen Downey finished reading The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
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Quotes by Allen B. Downey (?)

“For all live births, the mean pregnancy length is 38.6 weeks, the standard deviation is 2.7 weeks, which means we should expect deviations of 2-3 weeks to be common.”
― Allen B. Downey, Think Stats

tags: explanations-math

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