Whew! I’m glad that’s over. For Insiders, my recaps of the drafts for all 15 NL teams and all 15 AL teams are up, as well as my round one reactions and a post-draft Klawchat.
Charles Seife’s Proofiness: How You’re Being Fooled by the Numbers
Seife opens with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s famous claim about knowing the names of “205 … members of the Communist Party” who were at that moment working in the State Department. It was bullshit; the number kept changing, up and down, every time he gave a version of the speech, but by putting a specific number on it, the audience assumed he had those specific names. It’s a basic logical error: if he has the list of names, he must have the number, but that doesn’t mean the converse is true. He rips through a series of similarly well-known examples of public abuse of statistics, from the miscounting of the Million Man March to stories about blondes becoming extinct to Al Gore cherrypicking data in An Inconvenient Truth, to illustrate some of the different ways people with agendas can and will manipulate you with stats.
One of the best passages, and probably most relevant to us as the Presidential election cycle is beginning, is on polls – particularly on how they’re reported. Seife argues, with some evidence, that many reporters don’t understand what the margin of error means. (This subject also got some time in Ian Ayers’ Super Crunchers
For my purposes, it’s a good reminder that numbers can be illustrative but also misleading, especially since the line between giving stats for descriptive reasons can bleed into the appearance of a predictive argument. I pointed out the other day on Twitter that both Michael Conforto and Kyle Schwarber were on short but impressive power streaks; neither run meant anything given how short they were, but I thought they were fun to see and spoke to how both players are elite offensive prospects. (By the way, Dominic Smith is hitting .353/.390/.569 in his last 29 games, and has reached base in 21 straight games!) But I’d recommend this book to anyone working in the media, especially in the political arena, as a manual for how not to use statistics or to believe the ones that are handed to you. It’s also a great guide for how to be a more educated voter, consumer, and reader, so when climate change deniers claim the earth hasn’t warmed for sixteen years, you’ll be ready to spot and ignore it.
Next up: I’m way behind on reviews, but right now I’m halfway through Adam Rogers’ Proof: The Science of Booze