Do You Feel Lucky?

"This is part of the Murderous Maths series, and is my favourite book. It is great. It is a book for secondary school kids full of cartoons and lovely characters like this filthy boy called Pongo McWhiffy, or the one I like best is an upper-class idiot called Binky Smallbrains who falls for every trick. It is a book about chance, luck and probability, and these are difficult things that people have to learn about at school. This book really cracks through it. It starts with probability trees and then goes on to look at things like the gambler’s fallacy, Pascal’s triangle and so on. Possibly. What is nice is that it is not ashamed to face up to using gambling as a way of teaching, because games of gambling are often the best way to explain some of these concepts. You are just deluding yourself if you are going for a gamble that is likely to pay off. But psychology books would say there is a reason that people do this, because it gives them a small possibility of changing their lives. Psychologically, it might be quite a reasonable thing to do. Financially, it really isn’t worth it. It depends on what your knowledge is, and whether you can use your knowledge to beat the odds. I like premium bonds because you can keep the stake. The first one is “stuff happens”. Which means we cannot predict exactly how every event will turn out, but we can often predict the overall pattern of events surprisingly well. The next is that it is good to compare like with like. So if you want to show that speed cameras reduce road traffic accident rates, don’t just put them in places that have just had a run of accidents, as regression to the mean states that there will be fewer accidents by chance alone. Another is to think “What am I not being told?” For example, a person may have got better after she took this wonder treatment, but how many other people’s stories are not being featured? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And finally, twice not very much is still not very much, which means that increasing a tiny risk may not be so important. Almost everything interesting might help, and it might also harm. The trick is working out the balance for you. But in terms of tackling statistics in the news, I think things are changing. For example, here in the UK the head of the statistics authority, Sir Michael Scholar, spends his time publicly telling government ministers off for their use of statistics. So it is a very interesting time where I think things are gradually improving."