- 316 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
"[A] delightful addition to the stuff-you-think-you-know-that's-wrong genre, á laÂ
Freakonomics,Â
Outliers, andÂ
The Black Swan." —
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In Israel, pilot trainees who were praised for doing well subsequently performed worse, while trainees who were yelled at for doing poorly performed better. Evidence shows that highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent. Students who get the highest scores in third grade generally get lower scores in fourth grade.
And yet, it's wrong to conclude that screaming is an effective tool, that women choose men whose intelligence doesn't intimidate them, or that schools are failing third graders. In fact, there's one reason for each of these empirical facts—a statistical concept called "regression to the mean."
Regression to the mean seeks to explain, with statistics, the role of luck in our day-to-day lives. An insufficient appreciation of luck and chance can wreak all kinds of mischief in sports, education, medicine, business, politics, and more. It can make us see illness when we're not sick and see cures when treatments are worthless. Perfectly natural random variation can lead us to attach meaning to the meaningless.
Freakonomics showed how economic calculations can explain seemingly counterintuitive decision-making. Thinking, Fast and Slow identified a host of small cognitive errors that can lead to mistakes and irrational thought. Now, statistician and author of Standard Deviations Gary Smith shows—in clear, witty prose—how a statistical understanding of luck can change the way we see just about every aspect of our lives . . . and help us learn to rely less on random chance, and more on truth.
In Israel, pilot trainees who were praised for doing well subsequently performed worse, while trainees who were yelled at for doing poorly performed better. Evidence shows that highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent. Students who get the highest scores in third grade generally get lower scores in fourth grade.
And yet, it's wrong to conclude that screaming is an effective tool, that women choose men whose intelligence doesn't intimidate them, or that schools are failing third graders. In fact, there's one reason for each of these empirical facts—a statistical concept called "regression to the mean."
Regression to the mean seeks to explain, with statistics, the role of luck in our day-to-day lives. An insufficient appreciation of luck and chance can wreak all kinds of mischief in sports, education, medicine, business, politics, and more. It can make us see illness when we're not sick and see cures when treatments are worthless. Perfectly natural random variation can lead us to attach meaning to the meaningless.
Freakonomics showed how economic calculations can explain seemingly counterintuitive decision-making. Thinking, Fast and Slow identified a host of small cognitive errors that can lead to mistakes and irrational thought. Now, statistician and author of Standard Deviations Gary Smith shows—in clear, witty prose—how a statistical understanding of luck can change the way we see just about every aspect of our lives . . . and help us learn to rely less on random chance, and more on truth.
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Yes, you can access What the Luck? by Gary Smith in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Applied Mathematics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- COVER
- PRAISE FOR WHAT THE LUCK?
- ALSO BY GARY SMITH
- COPYRIGHT
- DEDICATION
- CONTENTS
- I. OVERREACTION
- II. INHERITED TRAITS
- III. EDUCATION
- IV. GAMES OF CHANCE
- V. SPORTS
- VI. HEALTH
- VII. Business
- VIII. Forecasting
- IX. Investing
- X. Conclusion
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- INDEX
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR