Science is a way of trying not to fool yourselves. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
More than anything else, this quote kept coming back to me while reading Innumeracy. It talks about 'Mathematical illiteracy and its consequences', which might sound heavy, but rest assured, the book is a real page turner. Conditional Probability, Prisoner's Dilemma, Statistics and errors and so on combined with a healthy dose of anecdotes (The author made money in Atlantic City using card counting. 21 comes to my mind) and fun trivia (rate of growth of human hair (10^-8 miles/hr)) means you just can't keep it down. More importantly, it tells you why this stuff is important, something you won't get by reading the Wikipedia entry. And important these things are! Just take a look at claims about economic situation, poll results, junta ki mang and so on. We clearly need something to check which (if any) of these make sense.
The book also discusses psuedoscience and this is a more apparent problem. Just turn on your TV and count the number of Babas, every channel seems to have at least one, with his own brand of help (cards, numbers and so on). News items proclaiming duniya ka anth and alien encounters abound (Some channels seem to exist for this very purpose). And these guys have a significant audience.
This book can clearly help. I wish everybody reads it.
-Richard Feynman
More than anything else, this quote kept coming back to me while reading Innumeracy. It talks about 'Mathematical illiteracy and its consequences', which might sound heavy, but rest assured, the book is a real page turner. Conditional Probability, Prisoner's Dilemma, Statistics and errors and so on combined with a healthy dose of anecdotes (The author made money in Atlantic City using card counting. 21 comes to my mind) and fun trivia (rate of growth of human hair (10^-8 miles/hr)) means you just can't keep it down. More importantly, it tells you why this stuff is important, something you won't get by reading the Wikipedia entry. And important these things are! Just take a look at claims about economic situation, poll results, junta ki mang and so on. We clearly need something to check which (if any) of these make sense.
The book also discusses psuedoscience and this is a more apparent problem. Just turn on your TV and count the number of Babas, every channel seems to have at least one, with his own brand of help (cards, numbers and so on). News items proclaiming duniya ka anth and alien encounters abound (Some channels seem to exist for this very purpose). And these guys have a significant audience.
This book can clearly help. I wish everybody reads it.
No comments:
Post a Comment