Among the books I have recently borrowed from the library, Jerry Muller’s (2018) book, the Tyranny of Metrics, has been the one I’d like to purchase a copy of and keep at hand for future reference. Muller is a historian who has written books on Adam Smith, various aspects of capitalism, and the history of conservative political thought. The initial seed for the Tyranny of Metrics, he writes in the introduction, was a series of…
O’Neil’s book offers a wide-ranging and alarming critique of Big Data technology, profit- and efficiency-driven algorithms. The title and the central concept in the book, Weapons of Math Destruction (WMDs), refers to prediction models that inform decisions at large scale and damage the well-being of many people subjected to them. They include models that categorize, track, screen, and managing “potential” criminals, contingent workers (especially minimum-wage workers), job and loan applicants, and insurance premiums. What makes…
Let’s begin this post with a comment by Chris Schuck on my recent video about The Data Detective by Tim Harford. Chris wrote: Some of the books in this genre look really great, but I was also thinking about how these statistical/quant critical thinking analyses are often at their most effective when placed in the context of a specific debate or social problem, often by attentive journalists. Zeynep Tufekci’s writing on the pandemic these past…
Tim Harford’s (2021) book, Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics, isn’t really about statistical methods. It has a much broader scope, and it is less technical than book on methods. It deals with knowledge in general, our relationship with knowledge, and the factors that determine that relationship for individuals and collectives. The book is very well-written. You get the sense that Harford has written the text slowly and patiently, based on…
… it is utterly useless to study a great thing like the Franciscan movement while remaining in the modern mood that murmurs against gloomy asceticism. The whole point about St. Francis of Assisi is that he certainly was ascetical and he certainly was not gloomy. Chesterton’s book Saint Francis of Assisi was published in 1923, about two decades after the publication of Heretics (1905) and a decade before the publication of Saint Thomas Aquinas: The…