Tim Harford is the author of nine books, including The Undercover Economist and The Data Detective, and the host of the Cautionary Tales podcast. He presents the BBC Radio programs More or Less, Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy, and How To Vaccinate The World. Tim is a senior columnist for the Financial Times, a member of Nuffield College, Oxford, and the only journalist to have been made an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.
I wrote...
The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
By
Tim Harford
What is my book about?
Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That's a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn't be suspicious of statistics--we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often "the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us." If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearly--understanding how our own preconceptions lead us astray--statistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter.
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The Books I Picked & Why
The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data
By
David Spiegelhalter
Why this book?
Professor David Spiegelhalter is perhaps the greatest living statistical communicator – a superbly clear and reassuring voice about probability, statistics and risk. This is his masterpiece: a highly readable book that starts with the basics and takes the reader through some deep statistical concepts.
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Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
By
Caroline Criado Perez
Why this book?
After fifteen years thinking and writing about data, this was the book that made me sit up and realise how much I’d been missing. Perez writes with serious fire about injustice, but she also rigorously analyses what is going on. Her argument is that the world has been built with “male” as the default and “female” as a special case – whether this is the design of smartphones or the design of stab-proof vests for police officers. Nowhere is this more true than in the data we collect and the research we conduct – or, all too often, fail to collect and conduct.
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Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong about the World--And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
By
Hans Rosling,
Anna Rosling Rönnlund,
Ola Rosling
Why this book?
I was lucky enough to meet Hans Rosling several times while he was alive. He was a simply magnificent communicator, a superb advocate for the power of data, a man whose optimism was always realistic and based on reality. This book, written with his daughter-in-law and son, really captures the man. It’s as though Hans is speaking – and what a voice he had.
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Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms
By
Hannah Fry
Why this book?
This is a clever and highly readable guide to the brave new world of algorithms: what they are, how they work, and their strengths and weaknesses. It’s packed with stories and vivid examples, but Dr Fry is a serious mathematician and when it comes to the crunch she is well able to show it with clear and rigorous analysis.
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The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and in Life
By
Michael Blastland,
Andrew Dilnot
Why this book?
I should declare an interest here: I present a BBC Radio show that Blastland and Dilnot created. This book was effectively my “how to” manual on the way into the studio that they had vacated. It’s a wise and varied guide to the power and the pitfalls of data, poetically written and full of subtle wisdoms.