100 books like The Data Detective

Though written by an academic philosopher, the highly readable On Bullshit weighs in at a breezy eighty pages.

What I love about this book is the way the author differentiates the bullshitter, who attempts to persuade without any regard for the truth, from the liar, who cares about the truth but tries to hide it. Frankfurt goes on to make a strong case for why bullshit is far more dangerous than lying.

In an age where bullshitters get more far attention than they deserve, this is even more relevant than when it was first published in the social-media-free year of 1986.

I recommend this book because the author, a professor of philosophy, presents a remarkably compelling, highly readable defense of the value of truth without descending into dogmatism. I was most impressed by the systematic, jargon-free way that Lynch addresses common arguments that are used to undermine the pursuit of truth, including extreme cynicism and extreme relativism.

One of my favorite statements is, “Absolute certainty is impractical and probably impossible. But as I’ve argued, this doesn’t have anything to do with the truth. We can acknowledge the frailty of the human condition and still go on pursuing truth.”

Unlike a lot of philosophy books, reading True to Life is not heavy going. And Lynch may even convince you that the impossible quest of pursuing truth is worth the effort. 

Because this book was first published in 1962, you might be surprised to learn that it has a lot to tell us about communication in the Digital Age.

McLuhan’s thesis is that, just as moving from a world dominated by oral communication to a world dominated by print changed human cognition, the movement to electronic communication–which, in 1962, primarily meant television–was actively rewiring human cognition.

Reading The Guttenberg Galaxy causes me to marvel at how thoroughly McLuhan understood that a technology that was then only in its infancy was going to change the way people think in profound, sometimes unsettling ways.

I was impressed by author Kent Greenfield’s courage in questioning the near-sacred notion that all of our choices are free. Greenfield is not an enemy of choice, freedom, or liberty, but he understands how popular culture has reduced these complex concepts into not much more than advertising slogans.

A law professor at Boston University, the author uses relatable real-life examples, many of them personal, to illustrate how things that we think of as free choices are not as free as we would like to believe. Greenfield is not a pessimist, and I appreciate his suggestions for thinking more carefully about the extent to which our choices are truly and freely our own. 

I found a copy of this book in the sixties. That copy, much loved, was lost in moves and mayhem. Now, I only have a Dover reprint (water-logged during yet another move), but I have never been without and would search high and low if I were.

This is also a history of probability but with a very different focus. Ms. David was a statistician able to explain the calculations intuitively (good to assign to my students). But she was also thoroughly interested in the personalities involved. What was Galileo like? What happened to Pascal at Port-Royal?

I felt personally drawn into the historical narrative that often reads like a novel. 

This book applies economic theory and econometric methods to problems in criminology.

It is divided into three parts. Part I discusses models of criminal recidivism. Part II describes the economic model of crime. Part III estimates cost functions for prisons.

Specific chapters cover statistical analysis of qualitative outcomes; analysis of two measures of criminal activity – the arrest rate and the conviction rate; and long-run estimates of cost functions for a group of Federal Correctional Institutions. 

I had never really given much thought to counting until I read this book, but in the very first chapter, Stone made me rethink everything I thought I knew about “one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.” She shows that every time we count, we’re making cultural assumptions. For example, what counts as a fish? And what makes the color of the fish more relevant than other features? Counting reveals that while these choices may seem intuitive, basic, and meaningless, they have very real impacts on people’s lives. Especially when we use numbers to measure things like merit, poverty, race, and productivity, those fundamental assumptions matter more than we care to admit.  

All politicians should be forced to read this book. Anyone who reads a newspaper should be forced to read this book. My favourite radio programme in the world is Tim Harford’s More or Less. And this book is every bit as good. Harford is clear, incisive, and always interesting. In a world crowded with disinformation and fake news, he shows you how to evaluate the numbers that are thrown at you. To read him is to become a little cleverer. Make this man prime minister someone.

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.

From well-known authorities in the R-sphere (including a former R Core Team member), this is a long-standing text whose first edition was one of the early books intended to teach R to beginners. It provides concise instructions and examples on how R is used as a programming language before focusing on 'number-crunching' statistical methods that are typically seen as computationally intensive. One of the notable features of this book is the statistical methods at hand are not just illustrated using 'black-box' code--the reader is provided with the necessary mathematical detail to understand what's going on behind the scenes for those that are so inclined.