Naked Statistics
The field of statistics is rapidly transforming into a discipline that Hal Varian at Google has called "sexy". And with good reason; from batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics is growing by leaps and bounds. In this book the author demystifies the study of statistics by stripping away the arcane and technical details to get at the underlying intuition that is key to understanding the power of statistical concepts. Tackling a wide-ranging set of problems, he demonstrates how statistics can be used to look at questions that are important and relevant to us today.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
17mentions
15people
2013–2024years
47% recommend53% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- For beginners, "Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data" by Charles Wheelan is a great choice. It explains everything with examples, making it super easy to read.
- "Naked Statistics" by Charles Wheelan is a very approachable entry level book. As opposed to a textbook, it's something that can be read casually in a relatively short amount of time, while still building a solid intuition on the subject.
- Some books I enjoyed and which could be beneficial:
- Borges' Aleph, and his essays (for example Other Inquisitions). He was fascinated about concepts programming is famous for now, he would have loved recursion
- Mann's The Wizard And The Prophet. He uses the life of two highly influential scientists (Borlaug and Vogt) as exemplars for two ways of viewing progress, one highly focused on technological progress, one being sceptical of technological progress
- Wachter-Boettcher's Technically Wrong, about implicit biases in modern technology and how that excludes or mistreats people. Some good lessons if you want to start a company and get as many customers as possible ;) Similar book with more academic stringency: Weapons Of Maths Destruction
- Roman's Writing That Works, non-fiction/memo/email advice from big advertising guys, lots of good advice on getting your point across
- Fromm's The Art Of Loving & The Sane Society, two non-fiction books from a sociologist/psychologist on how to work on your relationships (i.e., love as a movie concept doesn't exist, it's mostly very hard work and self-critique), and how society as a whole has very broken goals. Becker's The Denial Of Death (on how fear of death is a major drive in life) comes from a similar place
- Wilson's How To Teach Programming - delves deeply into the psychology of learning and how to build stable communities, it's available for free so why not
- Statistics books are always good to mend your thinking! My favorite layman's introduction is Motulsky's Intuitive Biostatistics (no formulas, plain English), for a non-practitioner Wheelan's Naked Statistics is probably better
- Seth Godin wrote lots of good business books, pick one (I liked Linchpin)
- If you haven't read them yet, get the 'classics' of software management: The Mythical Man-Month, and Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
- Cuckoo's Egg is a marvellously fun non-fiction book about a programmer tracking a hacker in the 80s, one of the first international computer crime cases, featuring tons of fun low-tech hacks
- Here are the books on my desk:
C++:
"The C++ Programming Language", Stroustrup
"Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++", Stroustrup
Quant:
"Quantitative Trading", Dr. Ernest Chan
"Algorithmic Trading", Dr. Ernest Chan
"Machine Trading: Deploying Computer Algorithms to Conquer the Markets", Dr. Ernest Chan
"Advances in Financial Machine Learning", Marcos Lopez de Prado
"Options, Futures and Other Derivatives (10th edition)", John C. Hull
Buddhism:
"Open Heart, Clear Mind", Thubten Chodron
"Buddhism For Beginners", Thubten Chodron
"Working with Anger", Thubten Chodron
Reading For Pleasure:
"Naked Statistics", Charles Wheelan
"Algorithms to Live By", Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
"Dark Pools"
"The Quants", Scott Patterson
"The Physics Of Wall Street", James Owen Weatherall
Plus some Chinese books, I wont bore with the details, unless anyone wants to know. Fun Fact, while I was in China for 8 weeks in late 2017 I bought 60 Chinese books and stuffed them in a suitcase. It cost me $4,000RMB (~$604 USD) to check all of my stuff and purchases home :-)
The Math books are:
"Discrete math", Susan Epp
"Discrete with Ducks"
various Calc books. If you want to learn math, find books that work for you. We all learn differently here.
My opinion: The Chan books are just amazing. Thought provoking and motivational. I am still reading the Prado book.
My opinion 2: If you ever want to slow down in life and learn what you are about, read about Buddhism. I'm not trying to start a flame war. It just works for me. It isn't being told what to believe because that is the way it is. I feel Buddhism lets me explore myself to find the right answers that work for me. Since studying my anger levels are in check. I am a better Husband. My wife comes first always.
- Statistics books I liked:
Motulsky's Intuitive Biostatistics - this one goes over all the usual methods used in science from distributions to t-test to ANOVA to regressions etc., the basics, but doesn't introduce the maths (you use R for that) but the assumptions and pitfalls of all of those methods.
Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide - this is all the stuff that's going wrong in applied statistics, a bit short but enlightening
Discovering Statistics Using R - a whopper of a book (~1000 pages?), it goes through everything while also being funny (the constant humor may not be for everyone). Graphs, correlations, regressions, all the MLMs and GLMs, linear models etc. pp., their assumptions, how to run them in R, how to interpret R's sometimes annoying output, etc. pp. Like Motulsky's, but wayyyyy more in-depth on the language's specifics.
Naked Statistics - an intro to stats for laypeople with a focus on politics/economics, good for interpreting and assessing daily news
- IMHO, "Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data" by Charles Wheelan is the best book to start with Probability and Statistics(you can buy it using the link below). I've studied those fields when I was at Uni, but never really got the intuition right. I wish I would have read that book back then. The book is short(~200 pages), and focuses on providing both the context and the intuition behind Probabilities. Once you get that right, the formulas just make sense. After reading that book, you will be way more comfortable to read books about Machine Learning, or any other fields where Probabilities and Statistics are a prerequisite.
http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Statistics-Stripping-Dread-Data-...
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