How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
by Jordan Ellenberg
Rating: 3.0 / 5 · Read · Finished 2025-08-25
A hodgepodge of topics from math and statistics, told using anecdotes and narratives and applied to real world situations. It’s basically a tour through various ways you can be wrong by misinterpreting the data. The book passed the time.
One quote I like: “Everything you do either gives you cancer or prevents it”
Another extended quote I like:
Opening a store or selling a service isn’t the same thing as buying a lottery ticket; you have some measure of control over your success. But the two enterprises have something in common: for most people, opening a business is a bad bet. It doesn’t matter how delicious you believe your barbecue sauce to be, how disruptively innovative you expect your app to be, how ruthless and borderline felonious you intend your business practices be - you are much more likely to fail than to succeed. That’s the nature of entrepreneurship: you balance a very, very small probability of making a fortune against a modest probability of eking out a living against a substantially larger probability of losing your pile, and for a large portion of potential entrepreneurs, when you crunch the numbers, the expected financial value, like that of a lottery ticket, is less than zero. Typical entrepreneurs (like typical lottery customers) overrate their chance of success. Even businesses that survive typically make their proprietors less money than they’d have drawn in salary from an existing company. And yet society benefits from a world in which people, against their wiser judgment, launch businesses. We want restaurants, we want barbers, we want smartphone games. Is entrepreneurship “a tax on the stupid”? You’d be called crazy if you said so.