Status Updates From How Not to Be Wrong: The Po...

I wish this book was published when I was still a math undergrad student.

-From someone who went over to the Evil World of Applied Math

Continues to be unexpectedly funny and engaging

AWESOME!

July 6th

Great! It makes me see the immediate benefit of learning more about math principles. Very engaging read so far.

18

18

72

So far I love this book. Can’t believe there is a book about math that makes me laugh. Can’t wait to read the rest!

Aside from the sections on P values, this book is a fun and simple read that I don' find too hard to get through.

'...the quibblers, the naysayers and the maybesayers...don't make things happen.'

Genius is a thing, not a person.

'There is a real danger that, by strengthening our abilities to analyse some questions mathematically, we acquire a general confidence in our beliefs, which extends unjustifiably to those things we're still wrong about.'

It's interesting how the author revisits eugenics again and again as an example of where quantitative reasoning can be bad.

The author uses lots of sports analogies I guess to help aid the layperson. But personally they make me fall asleep 😴

Well that was an incredibly long-winded discussion of the lottery.

Managed to touch on probability, chaos theory, utility theory, perspective geometry and information theory 😂

Probability can be seen as a degree of belief that something is true. Numerically flavoured advice.

"The purpose of statistics isn't to tell us what to believe, but to tell us what to do. Statistics is about making decisions, not answering questions."

Big fan of this thinking.

This is somewhat shaking my blind trust of scientific research

The concepts are explained really well and simply so far! Have also picked up all sorts of ways to think about maths itself too. I never thought of it as an extension of my common sense.

My favorite idea posed so far was by a Greek philologist/mathematician. He said that in order to go somewhere, you must first go halfway. and in order to go the rest of the distance, you must go halfway, and so on and so on. This logically proved that nobody can walk anywhere. This concept was used by the artist to disprove a linear way of thinking about data.

The most interesting thing in the chapters ive read this week was the fact that when humans are told to say random numbers, they almost never end in 0 or 5 because that doesent seem random.

Each chapter is a different story outlining mathematical thinking. It is a very dense read so far but definitely an interesting read so far.

chapters 13-16

chapters 11 & 12

chapters 7-10

chapters 5 & 6

chapters 2-4

This is taking me forever to read! Probably because I low-key hate nonfiction, but I hope to get through it eventually...

He is talking about strings of numbers and different famous mathematicians. It is really interesting so far and i am excited to finish it.