Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics Audiobook (Free)

“An extremely entertaining book about a extremely serious issue. We deceive ourselves all the time with statistics, and it is period we wised up.” -Robert J. Shiller, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics

Did you know football players whose names start out with the notice “D” are more likely to pass away young? Or that Asian People in america are most susceptible to heart attacks over the fourth day from the month? Or that drinking a full container of coffee every morning will add years to your daily life, but one glass per day about Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics escalates the risk of pancreatic cancers? Many of these “specifics” have already been argued using a direct encounter by credentialed analysts and backed up with reams of data and convincing figures.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically noticed, “If you torture data long enough, it’ll confess.” Laying with statistics is a time-honored con. In Regular Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the many tricks and traps that folks use to backup their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous intentionally try to mislead us. Other situations, the well-intentioned are blissfully unacquainted with the mischief they may be committing. Today, data is indeed plentiful that experts spend precious short amount of time distinguishing between good, meaningful indications and total rubbish. Not only do others use data to fool us, we fool ourselves.

With the breakout success of Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise, the once humdrum subject of statistics has never been hotter. Sketching on breakthrough analysis in behavioral economics by luminaries like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely and taking to task some of the conclusions of Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt, Standard Deviations demystifies the technology behind statistics and helps it be easy to identify the fraud throughout.