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So I may have a Phd in "maths", but it's pure maths, and I am woefully ignorant of statistics, not having studied it beyond a first year level (I've tutored second year stats. That was a challenge :D)
Thus my mind is actually quite easily blown by fairly basic statistics facts presented in an engaging way. See for example I'm not normal, which makes an obvious point I'd never really thought about before: The normal distribution became central to statistics back before computers, and once people get taught it, unless they go on to study more stats it's their only hammer so everything starts to look like a nail. But lots of large samples are NOT normally distributed, and given computing power we generally don't need to smoosh them into a nice distribution at all but can actually look at what the real data is doing.
My mind was also blown by Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin which is pretty much just a basic description of evolution being a bounded random walk (Namely, the mean complexity goes up over time while still leaving 99.9% of life at the same basic level, with anything but the most simple species being as likely to get more simple as less)
Thus my mind is actually quite easily blown by fairly basic statistics facts presented in an engaging way. See for example I'm not normal, which makes an obvious point I'd never really thought about before: The normal distribution became central to statistics back before computers, and once people get taught it, unless they go on to study more stats it's their only hammer so everything starts to look like a nail. But lots of large samples are NOT normally distributed, and given computing power we generally don't need to smoosh them into a nice distribution at all but can actually look at what the real data is doing.
My mind was also blown by Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin which is pretty much just a basic description of evolution being a bounded random walk (Namely, the mean complexity goes up over time while still leaving 99.9% of life at the same basic level, with anything but the most simple species being as likely to get more simple as less)
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I remember the random walk from thermodynamics in physics, it's funny how these things come up.
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Absolutely agree with this; it's one of those peculiar books where I read it and then figured that even if it was All Wrong (and I'm certain much of it was), then the thinking I got out of it was valuable. I think I might be a little peculiar.
If you do decide you're feeling critically robust enough to go there at some point, I'd take the writers' conclusions with a pinch of salt, but the themes of challenging common wisdom and looking for alternative theories to support statistical findings (not to mention confusing correlation and causation - a trap the authors themselves fall into at times) are worthwhile.
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