Something Doesn't Add Up: Surviving Statistics in a Number-Mad World

Description

Some people fear and mistrust numbers. Others want to use them for everything. After a long career as a statistician, Paul Goodwin has learned the hard way that the ones who want to use them for everything are a very good reason for the rest of us to fear and mistrust them. Something Doesn't Add Up is a field guide to the numbers that rule our world, even though they don't make sense. Wry, witty and humane, Goodwin explains mathematical subtleties so painlessly that you hardly need to think about numbers at all. He demonstrates how statistics that are meant to make life simpler often make it simpler than it actually is, but also reveals some of the ways we really can use maths to make better decisions. Enter the world of fitness tracking, the history of IQ testing, China's social credit system, Effective Altruism, and learn how someone should have noticed that Harold Shipman was killing his patients years before they actually did. In the right hands, maths is a useful tool. It's just a pity there are so many of the wrong hands about.

Paul Goodwin is a statistician, an emeritus professor at the University of Bath, and a former adviser to government departments. He has taught courses on statistics for trades union members, art curators, surgeons, actuaries, civil servants, CEOs and sixth formers, among many others. His most recent book is Forewarned: A Sceptic's Guide to Prediction.

Praise for Forewarned: A Sceptic's Guide to Prediction The book is awash with entertaining examples of predictions that were astoundingly accurate and others that were spectacularly wrong. * Irish Times *