Comment by gedrap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gedrap | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

- Introductory Statistics with R by Dalgaard, Peter. A solid introduction to stats, don't be scared by R bit in the title - it contains plenty of maths/theory so that knowledge is widely applicable. Brilliant introductory for everyone who wants to do something stats related. It's amazing how much can be done with no fancy deep learning algorithms, just plain simple stats.

- Statistics Done Wrong by Alex Reinhart. Plenty of gotchas with real world examples from academia. Well written and easy to read.

- The Circle by Dave Eggers. This one was scary. About imaginary corporation (a blend of Facebook and Google and Amazon) and probably not too distant future. If you liked Black Mirrors, you will love this.

- Brave New World by Huxley, Aldous. Classic novel with interesting thoughts about engineered society, where every human is assigned class, purpose in the society and feature at birth.

- Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal by Bilton, Nick. Read this book in a weekend, really well written and well researched about the inception of Twitter.

- Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Tetlock, Philip E. A study on people with above average ability to forecast feature events (mostly geo-political). Talks about measuring predictions and improving them.

- The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Brilliant book about overlooking rare events which have dramatic consequences because 'it's unlikely to happen'.

The Circle by Dave Eggers. This one was scary.

I enjoyed it and would recommend it, but at the same time, I felt a little disappointed in it. I think I expected a bit, more, somehow, given the premise. I dunno, it's hard to explain, but I just felt like there was more that could have been done with the setting and the premise.

Still, worth a read for sure.

I actually thought it was horrible and lazy. I thought of Eggers as a "literary" author, but the writing quality was low, and the plot unimaginative. It was like reading a thin script for a bad action movie.

I also read Ed Catmull's "Creativity Inc." this year, and one of the things he talked about was research trips for artists. He said that even if the audience of Ratatouille didn't know what the inside of a high end French kitchen looked like, it would come through in the movie that the ARTISTS did know. He emphasized the importance of these trips in the book.

Having worked in Silicon Valley, it felt like Eggers basically read a bunch of newspaper articles about it and then wrote a book, rather than visiting the place and talking to people. If you want to write a dystopian novel, this area is certainly rich with possibility. I remember that 10+ years ago I was astounded at how well "Microserfs" captured the mood and motivations of people... I'll have to go back and read it again.

It felt to me as if it were written in a rush.

I wasn't a huge fan of The Circle. It did a decent job of presenting the creep of surveillance powers that come along with ever more useful social media features. But it didn't have a coherent argument against them. It was sort of left to the reader to see (or maybe just feel) how dangerous The Circle was getting, because most of the characters themselves didn't. Even the ones who did couldn't explain why.

Maybe I just went into the book expecting an examination of the types of tradeoffs we make when interacting with social media, and instead got a thriller. The Circle works pretty well as a thriller to be honest, its just that there is still room for a more serious novel on its subject matter.

Regarding the first one (Introductory Statistics) what would you say the pre-requisites are? I'm not much of a mathematician, in fact I might even need to brush up on high school math by now, but I've thought about statistics for a while now. Is it approachable or would I have to study up to college level?

It is very approachable. If you know the difference between mean and median then you know enough to study the book.

It is written as a textbook for graduate biology students to help with their research, so it doesn't assume much mathematical knowledge. It also contains exercises (with answers) at the end of each chapter, really helps to consolidate the newly acquired knowledge.

Does it start from first principles? E.g., does it explain the central limit theorem in depth?

Thanks!

The Black Swan seems really good, would you say it's entertaining for non-maths nerds?

The way I think of Black Swan is "making money with philosophy" as opposed to "making money with mathematics". It's not mathematical in the quantitative sense; it's more about fallacies and misapplications of statistics.

One thought I've had: If you look the wealthiest guys in the industry and the world, they are more philosophical than mathematical, like Peter Thiel or Paul Graham. An exception would be someone like James Simons (hedge fund guy).

Warren Buffett says he basically just does arithmetic, and the rest of it is critical thinking and controlling your emotions. I was pleasantly surprised to see his partner Charlie Munger talk a lot about cognitive fallacies, which are in the realm of philosophy.

Read the black swan and thinking fast and slow after, I think the combination is life changing. It was for me anyways. They really complement each other.

Many of the studies quoted in Thinking Fast and Slow, turned out to be spurious: https://twitter.com/BrianNosek/status/811952178592026624

Not a math nerd. Reading it now. Totally enjoyable. Could not recommend it more.

>- Introductory Statistics with R by Dalgaard, Peter.

If one is new to R, would this text be a good intro to the language?

Yes, the first chapter or two is dedicated to the basics of R (syntax, etc).

Great; thanks, will add it to the reading list. I took a statistics course this past summer, but it was poorly taught and used Minitab as a package. Hopefully self-study with this text will be better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com