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

“Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world.”

Really interesting

i cheated a bit and skipped some ~40 pgs
it was nice, I preferred the pure math ramblings and philosophical waxing over the applied math and real-life examples, those are less fun to me... I quite liked the end chapter where he concludes how not to be wrong = knowing that you may be wrong, and approaching everything with nuance <3

baaasically stats =w= I find the little bits of geometry/group theory/etc very fun but it's all just dressing on a stats backbone... which makes sense I guess bc stats is most applicable to real-life situations but it's not my favourite, I read it kinda unenthusiastically

Following along but this book is no layman’s book! He tries to relate the high math to everyday stuff but it doesn’t get through effectively: I don’t play lotteries & don’t care. The roulette wheel? I don’t gamble like that, the math he does hardly teaches me. Help me understand car traffic, or some relatable things. This book is more for his colleagues while trying to pass off as for everyone.

Section on two rails & infinity/parallel didn’t make sense for me. I feel like I’m reading but only skimming the surface of the things the author writes of. I feel dumb. Had hoped for this to be made a bit more comprehensible, I wonder if these mathematical musings could be made more palatable, but, after all, it IS math, and so I can’t complain about my ineptitude. Just wish I could understand tho!

Intriguing, I can only follow along the surface of some topics, it's clear that I'm in the world of mathematics, and that Ellenberg has an ocean of knowledge from which he gives but drops and cupfuls to share. The probabilities are tricky; and the logarithm section still confuses me even though he wrote that he'd explain it. I appreciated the section at the beginning about finding the hypotenuse.

I can follow along, not feel baffled-overwhelmed by the subject of mathematics. But then, sometimes, there are these sentences "A low-powered study is only going to be able to see a pretty big effect." What's a low-powered study, one w/a small budget, or at some small school? Why does he say "only," is this as in "merely," am I to expect something of a low-powered study? And what's a pretty big effect?

Cartea prezintă situații interesante, dar mi se pare puțin cam greu de citit. O să o las de-o parte momentan.

Fun

The chapter 2 beginning describing the probabilities was pretty boring, but the end with the insight into why people think that 0 is less random than 7 described by the bayesian inference was pretty cool.

Good read

I appreciate this guy's acknowledgement of the limits of quantitative reasoning-- lately I've been annoyed by fanboys of empiricism who won't believe anything that's not backed up by numbers... if they realize that numbers (under our current methods) can't explain everything, yet still stubbornly demand reason because they TRUST in numbers, that's no different than any other religion based on not fact, but instinct

ngh... so much stats

the title struck me as a lil obnoxious but the insides are very nice, very witty

“It's not wrong to say Hilbert was a genius. But it's more right to say that what Hilbert accomplished was genius. Genius is a thing that happens, not a kind of person.”

― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

Have to read for class....

A mathematician is always asking, “What assumptions are you making? And are they justified?”

końcówkę męczę jak nie wiem

You aren't promising much with that title are you author

" Mathematics is extension is common sense by other means. "

Chapter 8

A great book about how math is almost everything in the real world.
Includes a great Lindsay Lohan quote.

Book is purely about statistical reasoning which has been hard to get through. Might finish this later,

Retomado hoje. Por volta da página 200 começou a meter demasiados conceitos ao barulho e entretanto tem andado mais de lado.

My experience with books of this type "How to xx".. started reading through various methodologies to achieve xx and end up reading a final chapter almost half a size of the book only to tell me, why not doing xx is a good thing!! Not cool people.

“Cancer is a biologic, not a statistical problem,” [Berkson] write in 1958. “Statistics can soundly play an ancillary role in its elucidation. But if biologists permit statisticians to become arbiters of biologic questions, scientific disaster is inevitable.”

“Eventually, the state caught on and canceled the program, but not before La Condamine and Voltaire had taken the government for enough money to be rich men for the rest of their lives. What—you thought Voltaire made a living writing perfectly realized essays and sketches? Then, as now, that’s no way to get rich.”

“Pure mathematics can be a kind of convent, a quiet place safely cut off from the pernicious influences of the world’s messiness and inconsistency. I grew up inside those walls. Other math kids I knew were tempted by applications to physics, or genomics, or the black art of hedge fund management, but I wanted no such rumspringa.”

“What Sherlock Holmes should have said was: ‘It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn’t occur to you to consider.’ “ - Jordan Ellenberg, 2014