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

“Genius is a thing that happens, not a kind of person.”

Dude really should've hired an illustrator to help, because his drawings are not as clear as they ought to be.

My strong aversion towards Math never helped me in any way during the entirety of my existence and has only contributed to certain dull moments where I wished that I hadn't suck so bad.
So this book is an attempt to rekindle a genuine interest in the subject and hoping to look towards battling the demon in a different light and come across an angel in the process.

Loved this so much. One of my favorite books. Will reread again soon

onto Regression!

Good examples of the differences between correlation and causation (political in nature).

Finished part 2, on inference. 🔥🔥🔥

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

This book was listed as one of Bill Gates top 5 books of the year. So I’m curious to find out :)

"[...]countries don't win wars just by being braver than other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost. That's not the stuff war movies are made of, but it's the stuff wars are made of. And there's math every step of the way." - Jordan Ellenberg, 2014

on page 99/602

This is really interesting and speaks to how we interpret data and solve problems.

MIT kids versus the lottery, insanity

“As much as I love numbers, I think people ought to stick to ‘I don’t believe in God’ or ‘I do believe in God’ or ‘I’m not sure’” (instead of “it’s unlikely we were created so perfectly if God didn’t exist”)

“It’s customary to express our uncertainty about something as a number” e.g. “20% chance of rain tomorrow - among some large population of past days with similar conditions, 20% of them were followed by rainy days. But what can we mean when we say, ‘There’s a 20% chance that God created the universe?’”

Regression to the mean. Reminds me of Thinking Fast and Slow

Reading this for my math class. I'm really enjoying it, and kind of wished I didn't have to take notes every other page. I loved the plane story and it's very funny over all.

Expected utility

A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simpler version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn’t object.

“That’s how the Law is Large Numbers works: not by balancing out what’s already happened, but by diluting what’s already happened with new data, until the past is so proportionately negligible that it can be safely forgotten.”

"Mathematics is the extension of common sense by other means." - page 13

"Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends on where you already are." - page 24

Math is woven into the way we reason, and math makes you better at things. Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world. Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument.

started out slow but honestly this book is making me rethink / question every new study i read about in the news now. nice reminder of how important/muddled statistics can be especially for someone who hasn’t taken stats since high school...

Buffon's Needle Problem

Good discussion about when it is profitable to play the lottery

Neyman and Pearson (as opposed to Fischer) take the approach that statistics help us *make decisions*, not *determine truth* - analogous to courte whose purpose is to deliver justice, not determine truth. needed a moment to appreciate this

“the international journal of haruspicy” idea is really getting to me... frequency of publications of rubbish correlations makes academia look pretty bleak

advantages and shortfalls of the significance test, demonstrated through shakespeare and basketball studies

Reading fast for now.

Finished 8/3/18 ...There are things I know I don’t know. This book was full of them.

Will review later.