> The book by Freedman, Pisani, and Purves is the one I would have liked to teach from, and it was the book I drew upon the most in prepping my own lectures, as an antidote to the overwrought and confused style of my assigned text. The authors maintain the underlying attitude that statistics is a useful tool for understanding certain questions about the world, but in this way it augments human judgement, rather than supplanting it. To quote from the preface:
> > Why does the book include so many exercises that cannot be solved by plugging into a formula? The reason is that few real-life statistical problems can be solved that way. Blindly plugging into statistical formulas has caused a lot of confusion. So this book takes a different approach: thinking.