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…
Self-help is a tricky subject. Depending on the audience, it can provoke intense sympathy and intense skepticism. A dismissive attitude toward the current self-help culture can point to the lack of substance and depth in the popular material, the deceitful and self-serving “gurus,” the hyper-optimism of followers, the fixation with “positive thinking,” the unrealistic promises, the individualistic bias, and the social-political blindspots. But should the self-help culture–with all its associated ideas and aspirations–be completely dismissed?…
I wrote the following six short essays a while ago, and in somewhat of a haste. The haste came from knowing if I were to slow down, I’d not get to the end. There are some things you can do only in a rush, and those things tend not to be very pleasant. In any case, I’d like to return to them soon and see if I can reconsider some of my previous thoughts and…