Thinking books · Probability & quantitative thinking · Jordan Ellenberg, 2014

How Not to Be Wrong — the big ideas

Mathematical thinking as an extension of common sense, shown through real cases.

Free — no account needed to read

The big ideas

The wartime aircraft armour story is the cleanest illustration of survivorship bias there is: the planes that came back showed where a plane can be hit and survive.

Linearity is the most common quiet error — assuming more of something keeps producing more of the result, when most real relationships curve.

Statistical significance is widely misunderstood as importance, and the gap between the two causes a great deal of confident nonsense.

Practise it — no need to have read it

Find an assumption of yours that more X produces more Y. Sketch what happens at very low and very high X.

A hint: Almost nothing is linear at both ends.

Where it shows up in real life

• Reading studies
• Scaling anything
• Your own metrics

Described in our own words with the source named — never quoted, and not a substitute for reading the book.