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"We live in a world of information overload. Facts and figures on absolutely everything are at our fingertips, but are too often biased, distorted, or outright lies. From unemployment figures to voting polls, IQ tests to divorce rates, we're bombarded by seemingly plausible statistics on how people live and what they think. Daniel Levitin teaches us how to effectively ask ourselves: can we really know that? And how do they know that?"
This is a good book. Given the times we live in, you could argue that reading and understanding this (or similar or better) type of book is mandatory for the common people to gain some basic statistics/math knowledge to analyse information presented to them. Election polls, autism claims, economy/GDP figures, uknown uknowns and so on are discussed as case studies. There is vast amounts of data today and it is possible to skew and misrepresent the data to influence the reader's perception.
Although this book is good, and presents some of the cases very well, I felt a missed opportunity to have more fun with the cases/data. The tone of the writing is more textbook like. I'd have preferred a more witty writing as this may have allowed the reader to absorb information better. Having said that, I did enjoy reading some of the cold hard logical truths (keeping emotions aside) and the details of Bimodal Distributions and Bayesian Probability.
Overall, I would recommend having a read. Even if you get through just 100 pages covering a few case studies of the dry textbook like read, you'd have gained some invaluable methods to dissect information.
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