Xi'an's Og

“…this book will train readers to be statistically savvy at a time when immunity to misinformation is essential: not just for the survival of liberal democracy, as the authors assert, but for survival itself.Perhaps a crash course on bullshit detection should be a mandatory part of the school curriculum.”

In the latest issue of Nature, EJ Wagenmaker has written a book review of the book Calling Bullshit, by  Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. Book written out of a course taught by the authors at the University of Washington during Spring Quarter 2017 and aimed at teaching students how to debunk bullshit, that is, misleading exploitation of statistics and machine learning. And subsequently turned into a book. Which I have not read. In his overall positive review EJ regrets the poor data visualisation scholarship of the authors, who could have demonstrated and supported the opportunity for a visual debunking of the original data. And the lack of alternative solutions like Bayesian analysis to counteract p-fishing. Of course, the need for debunking and exposing statistically sounding misinformation has never been so present.

This entry was posted on August 26, 2020 at 12:20 am and is filed under Books, Statistics with tags big data, book review, democracy, lies, Nature, University of Amsterdam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.