Status Updates From How to Make the World Add U...

2 h 5

1 h 52

1 h 26

36 mins

Trying out the audio book format. Promising so far.

A very solid read and with very recent examples

Stay curious!

Great introduction

More on bedrock data. Who owns data collected by the government?

The bedrock data.

Comparison of work on these AI algorithms to Alchemy seemed far-fetched at first but now I agree. We need transparency!

All these results that I've heard about over the past twenty years later turned out to be not-so-true. And... the famous experiments by Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram were performed before females were discovered by scientists.

We've covered the first five rules. I like "avoid premature enumeration".

The book presents ten rules. The first is to pay attention to how a data claim makes me feel. If I don't like what the claim supports I may dismiss it too readily. And if I like it, I may ignore obvious flaws.

Wait. What??? Darrell Huff, the beloved author of _How to Lie with Statistics_ in 1954, later went to work for the tobacco industry, helping them to obfuscate damaging statistics???

P. 59 : "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

Fantastic exploration of critical thinking and the use of statistics

When you see a statistical claim, pay attention to your own reaction. If you feel outrage, triumph, denial, pause for a moment. Then reflect. You don’t need to be an emotionless robot, but you could and should think as well as feel.

Schelling points, multiple equilibria, and people swinging to (hopefully positive?) focal points in response to externalities

Rational choice theory is practically a religion for economists, and why not? You go a long way by assuming that people respond to incentives. Why does the farmer in rural Montana directly affected by global warming keep voting in the party that denies climate change? Because he's responding to the social incentive of conforming to his in-group. His vote to the Dems will do something for the climate, but not much.

Good nonfiction writers consistently do something clever: they begin a chapter with a story but leave it unfinished: "let us appreciate the principles first; to do that, we have to go to a speed date bar!" or something. Here the first chapter starts with a story of how an art critic was fooled by a fake Vermeer, but promises to reveal the cause of his error later. Pro move, Tim.

The Taleb approach to making up your mind about a piece of evidence: if you *want* it to be true, it deserves closer scrutiny than usual.

Harford: "I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their preconceptions."

The truth is attainable, but not easily.

Harford makes a really interesting case that the whole point of the fake news-generating propaganda machine that Trump set up in 2016 was to embed the *idea* of fake news in the popular imagination. It was a cudgel he could use to silence his critics, however well-sourced they were. The politics of doubt is the legacy of tobacco companies that called for "more studies!" on the relationship between smoking and cancer.

It's possible to show a statistically significant correlation b/w # of storks in a country and the # of babies. Does this prove the theory that storks deliver babies? Not likely. Maybe big countries have big bird populations. In other words, statistics can penetrate into the heart of a matter -- or backfire completely.

“Os comunicadores persuasivos da atualidade não querem que pare pata pensar. Querem que se despache a sentir.”

“Preocupa-me um mundo em que muitas pessoas acreditam em qualquer coisa, mas preocupa-me muito mais um em que as pessoas acreditam que não há mais nada além dos seus próprios preconceitos”

“Se cedermos à tentação de sentir que deixamos de ter o poder de perceber o que é verdade, estaremos a prescindir de uma ferramenta vital”

This book is intriguing. I think it’s going to be very helpful and equally interesting.

Statistics can be a very useful tool!!!