Recent Books -- Roy G. Biv, Secrecy, Make the World Add Up
16 March 2021
- Roy G. Biv by Jude Stewart. A collection of anecdotes and facts about color, not as deep as I would like, but interesting and amusing.
- Secrecy by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Relevant when he wrote it, relevant in the Iraq WMD era, relevant now. Secrecy supports a lot of bad behaviors, whether in a government or an organization.
- How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford. Very good coverage of how to think about statistics, how to debug them, how to understand them. The closing summary chapter was particularly valuable – much of our current polarization is very emotion driven, and no amount of statistics and facts will change anyone’s mind. But sometimes, asking people to really explain their own view in detail, and asking a lot of genuine questions about it, may cause them to reflect and reconsider, and you may learn something yourself. Genuine curiosity about details is a powerful force.
