Naked Statistics

When I signed up for an introductory statistics course in college, I expected it would cover exactly what this book addresses. At that time, newspaper articles sometimes referred to the book that inspired this one, Darrell Huff’s How to Lie with Statistics.

I was excited to learn how to avoid getting snared by inadvertent and intentional flaws in public opinion polls, medical studies, and investment research. In a highly readable, entertaining style, Charles Wheelan arms his readers against all those pitfalls.

The somewhat abstruse quantitative methods actually taught emphasized in the statistics course proved to be helpful professionally. But… show more.

Statistics is shown to be anything but dry in this book, as using wit, intuition, and clarity, the author shows how statistical concepts relate to everyday life.

He is able to separate important ideas from overly technical details, hence the title, Naked Statistics. I took many of his approaches to heart in my teaching. Wheelan gives many examples of how using readily available data yields deep inferences about the world we live in.

If you want to make sense of data and numbers, this is one of the most fun books to read.

In very intuitive terms it shows why being able to read between the data is so important for making sense of the world. A great introduction to anyone who wants to make more evidence-based decisions.