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Alan Schwarz’s The Numbers Game is an indispensable look at how the numbers that have come to define the game of baseball came to be. The book is less about the hallowed numbers that even casual fans can identify; Aaron’s 755 home runs, DiMaggio’s 56 game hit-streak, Nolan Ryan’s 5714 strikeouts, Cy Young’s 511 wins, Pete Rose’s [...]
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I recently finished Diego Gambetta’s Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. For those looking for a more academic take on signaling (particularly from a sociological point of view) it’s a great find. As I previously mentioned, Gambetta uses the extreme case of cooperation amongst criminals to tease out more general dynamics of trust, signaling, and [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: applied signaling, book review, signaling | 1 Comment »
Charles Seife’s Proofiness is an accessible and entertaining look at the many ways numbers can be used (more to the point, abused) in order to win an argument. Seife spends the early part of the book outlining his typology for numerical abuses. For instance, “disestimation” is the act of taking a number too literally, understating [...]
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A few weeks ago I wrote an initial reaction to Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Ridley’s thesis is that the key to prosperity lies in economic growth, and that economic growth is caused primarily by innovation fueled by the exchange and mating of ideas. As long as ideas are allowed to move freely they will inevitably mate, mutate, [...]
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Jerome Groopman’s How Doctors Think attempts to shed light on the cognitive processes of doctors as they go about the business of diagnosing and treating patients. Groopman’s thesis is that, contra to what is taught in medical schools, the very best doctors do not follow the algorithmic, Bayesian diagnostic process. Algorithmic analyses is often adequate [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: behavioral economics, book review, diagnostics, psychology | 1 Comment »
My brief review here.
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Fiction
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
Non-fiction
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value
The Numbers Game
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception
The Rational Optimist
The Quiet American
How Doctors Think
The Wisdom of Whores
Switch
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
