Joshua R. Taylor’s Reviews > How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life > Status Update

'...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.'

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.