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    What the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives
    What the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives
    What the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives
    Audiobook7 hours

    What the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives

    Written by Gary Smith

    Narrated by Tim Andres Pabon

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The newest book by the acclaimed author of Standard Deviations takes on luck, and all the mischief the idea of luck can cause in our lives.

    In Israel, pilot trainees who were praised for doing well subsequently performed worse, while trainees who were yelled at for doing poorly performed better. It is an empirical fact that highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent. Students who get the highest scores in third grade generally get lower scores in fourth grade.

    And yet, it's wrong to conclude that screaming is not more effective in pilot training, women choose men whose intelligence does not intimidate them, or schools are failing third graders. In fact, there's one reason for each of these empirical facts: Statistics. Specifically, a statical concept called Regression to the Mean.

    Regression to the mean seeks to explain, with statistics, the role of luck in our day to day lives. An insufficient appreciation of luck and chance can wreak all kinds of mischief in sports, education, medicine, business, politics, and more. It can lead us to see illness when we are not sick and to see cures when treatments are worthless. Perfectly natural random variation can lead us to attach meaning to the meaningless.

    Freakonomics showed how economic calculations can explain seemingly counterintuitive decision-making. Thinking, Fast and Slow, helped readers identify a host of small cognitive errors that can lead to miscalculations and irrational thought. In What the Luck?, statistician and author Gary Smith sets himself a similar goal, and explains--in clear, understandable, and witty prose--how a statistical understanding of luck can change the way we see just about every aspect of our lives...and can help us learn to rely less on random chance, and more on truth.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateOct 1, 2016
    ISBN9781469065601
    Author

    Gary Smith

    Gary Smith received his B.S. in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College and his PhD in Economics from Yale University. He was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University for seven years. He is currently the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He has won two teaching awards and has written (or co-authored) seventy-five academic papers, eight college textbooks, and two trade books (most recently, Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics, Overlook/Duckworth, 2014). His research has been featured in various media including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Motley Fool, NewsWeek and BusinessWeek. For more information visit www.garysmithn.com.

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    Reviews for What the Luck?

    3.5/5

    9 ratings1 review

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    • 3/5
      The whole book talks about one concept: 'The tendency for regression towards the mean'
      And discusses the many different ways it occurs in our lives (so many stats and examples)
      So if you like hearing stats and examples then this is the book for you.

      I found the book interesting but repetitive.