Here are 100 books that Games, Gods and Gambling fans have personally recommended if you like
Games, Gods and Gambling.
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I’ve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Plato’s Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering.
Can you love a book that you disagree with? I do! I love this extravagant account of how Bayesian Statistics was enmired in controversy and, after 200 years, saved everything from Western Civilization to Captain Dreyfus.
I don’t think that Bayesian statistics is the foundation of all rational thought, but I am happy to celebrate all its wonderful achievements. Every page of this book is lively and personal, engrossing, entertaining, masterful…all of that.
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice: A vivid account of the generations-long dispute over Bayes' rule, one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of applied mathematics and statistics
"An intellectual romp touching on, among other topics, military ingenuity, the origins of modern epidemiology, and the theological foundation of modern mathematics."-Michael Washburn, Boston Globe
"To have crafted a page-turner out of the history of statistics is an impressive feat. If only lectures at university had been this racy."-David Robson, New Scientist
Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’ve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Plato’s Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering.
I am laughing out loud, even now that I am rereading this book for the umpteenth time. Fraudsters are so clever, and so is advertising. And then there is sloppy journalism with its “wow” statistics.
I like his book enormously, not least because of its witty illustrations. It is subversive, comic, and provocative, and it makes me wise to seductive, misleading practices–and it does so with a light touch.
From distorted graphs and biased samples to misleading averages, there are countless statistical dodges that lend cover to anyone with an ax to grind or a product to sell. With abundant examples and illustrations, Darrell Huff's lively and engaging primer clarifies the basic principles of statistics and explains how they're used to present information in honest and not-so-honest ways. Now even more indispensable in our data-driven world than it was when first published, How to Lie with Statistics is the book that generations of readers have relied on to keep from being fooled.
I often think of the ways my life could have gone differently. Career-changing emails that were only narrowly rescued from spam folders, for example. In many parallel timelines, I doubt I’m still doing what I do today—which makes me cherish my good fortune to still be doing it. What I do is study the ways people have come to understand everything can go otherwise and that the future is, therefore, an open question and undecided matter. Of course, for ages, many have instead assumed that events can only go one way. But the following books persuasively insist history isn’t dictated by destiny, but is governed by chance and (sometimes) choice.
Hacking writes in pellucid prose. Reading this book—in an old, dusty library many years ago—is what convinced me, for better or worse, that uncovering the history of ideas was something not only that could be viably done but could be done rigorously.
Hacking’s book tells the story of the emergence of one of the areas of mathematics that arguably shapes our world today more than any other: probability. It governs financial markets as much as military decisions, carving up the edges of our world.
Rewinding to the beginning of the modern age, Hacking tells the story of how an Italian gambler from the 1500s—one Gerolamo Cardano—haphazardly discovered the science of measuring chances and the art of taking them, unwittingly creating the fields of actuary and insurance that shape the foundation of our modern world.
It is riveting stuff: don’t let the mathematical topic put you off. Though this book is…
Historical records show that there was no real concept of probability in Europe before the mid-seventeenth century, although the use of dice and other randomizing objects was commonplace. Ian Hacking presents a philosophical critique of early ideas about probability, induction, and statistical inference and the growth of this new family of ideas in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Hacking invokes a wide intellectual framework involving the growth of science, economics, and the theology of the period. He argues that the transformations that made it possible for probability concepts to emerge have constrained all subsequent development of probability theory and…
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
I’ve wanted to be a philosopher since I read Plato’s Phaedo when I was 17, a new immigrant in Canada. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with time, space, and quantum mechanics and involved in the great debates about their mysteries. I saw probability coming into play more and more in curious roles both in the sciences and in practical life. These five books led me on an exciting journey into the history of probability, the meaning of risk, and the use of probability to assess the possibility of harm. I was gripped, entertained, illuminated, and often amazed at what I was discovering.
I love this book because it builds practical advice on a philosophical critique.
Can philosophy generate truly practical advice for planning and public policy? Randomized Controlled Trials are the gold standard for evidence in industrial planning and public policy. But if the results are taken naively, they mislead.
I’m a long-time fan of author Nancy Cartwright, a McArthur Genius Award winner. I love her provocative approach when abstract thought has to confront real practice.
Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality--of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyze evidence the right ones? In Evidence-Based Policy, Nancy Cartwright, an eminent scholar, and Jeremy Hardie, who has had a long and successful career in both business and the economy, explain that the dominant methods which are in use now--broadly speaking, methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomized…
A noted quantitative hedge fund manager and quant finance author, Ernie is the founder of QTS Capital Management and Predictnow.ai. Previously he has applied his expertise in machine learning at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center’s Human Language Technologies group, at Morgan Stanley’s Data Mining and Artificial Intelligence Group, and at Credit Suisse’s Horizon Trading Group. Ernie was quoted by Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, and the CIO magazine, and interviewed on CNBC’s Closing Bell program. He is an adjunct faculty at Northwestern University’s Master’s in Data Science program and supervises student theses there. Ernie holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.
I have used this book to teach my Financial Risk Analytics course at Northwestern University for many years. As a textbook, it is surprisingly easy to read, and the abundant exercises are great. This would be a foundational text to read after you have read my own books. It puts you on solid ground to understand all the financial babble that you may read elsewhere. It includes extensive coverage of most basic topics important to a serious quantitative trader, while not being overly mathematical. Easily understandable if you have basic programming and math background from first year of university.
Everything is practical in this book, which isn’t what you would expect from a textbook! There is no math for math’s sake. I have used the techniques discussed in this book for real trading, and for creating features at my machine learning SaaS predictnow.ai. Examples: What’s the difference between net…
The new edition of this influential textbook, geared towards graduate or advanced undergraduate students, teaches the statistics necessary for financial engineering. In doing so, it illustrates concepts using financial markets and economic data, R Labs with real-data exercises, and graphical and analytic methods for modeling and diagnosing modeling errors. These methods are critical because financial engineers now have access to enormous quantities of data. To make use of this data, the powerful methods in this book for working with quantitative information, particularly about volatility and risks, are essential. Strengths of this fully-revised edition include major additions to the R code…
In my career as an academic librarian, I was often asked to teach students to think about the credibility of the information they incorporate into their academic, professional, personal, and civic lives. In my teaching and writing, I have struggled to make sense of the complex and nuanced factors that make some information more credible and other information less so. I don’t have all the answers for dealing with problematic information, but I try hard to convince people to think carefully about the information they encounter before accepting any of it as credible or dismissing any of it as non-credible.
I constantly recommend The Data Detective because it serves as an unmatched handbook for making sense of the statistical data to which we are constantly exposed.
What I like about it, besides its lively, readable style, is that the book convincingly and clearly explains 1) why we need statistical data to make informed decisions, 2) the factors that go into producing reliable statistics, 3) the factors that can produce unreliable statistics, and 4) how any statistics, reliable or not, can be misused to deceive us.
The author, Tim Harford, is an economist who writes for the Financial Times and hosts the brilliant podcast Cautionary Tales.
From “one of the great (greatest?) contemporary popular writers on economics” (Tyler Cowen) comes a smart, lively, and encouraging rethinking of how to use statistics.
Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics—we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.” If we can toss…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
As a writer and historian, I’m all about rabbit holes. When something I’ve never heard about before catches my interest, I have to find out more—and sometimes I end up writing whole books on the subject! I have a head full of bizarre little nuggets of information, and I love reading books, like the ones here, that tell me something new and change my way of thinking.
A book on statistics that is interesting? Yes, actually. AndTheTigerthat Isn’tis more than just interesting, it’s useful. Maths was never my strong point at school, but even someone who never got the hang of quadratic equations can learn to ask useful questions when faced with bamboozlingly large numbers and dodgy ‘averages’.
This book offers a way to see through statistics that are used to conceal information as much as to reveal it. It’s worth reading just for the section on rice and random distribution. And the tiger in the title? It’s what happens when you think you see a pattern (in this case, stripes in the undergrowth), but there is no pattern at all.
Mathematics scares and depresses most of us, but politicians, journalists and everyone in power use numbers all the time to bamboozle us. Most maths is really simple - as easy as 2+2 in fact. Better still it can be understood without any jargon, any formulas - and in fact not even many numbers. Most of it is commonsense, and by using a few really simple principles one can quickly see when maths, statistics and numbers are being abused to play tricks - or create policies - which can waste millions of pounds. It is liberating to understand when numbers are…
Throughout my academic career, my chief scholarly interest has been to assess public policy using coherent theory and rigorous empirical method.The economics of crime and justice offers a powerful framework for achieving these ends.
This book applies economic theory and econometric methods to problems in criminology.
It is divided into three parts. Part I discusses models of criminal recidivism. Part II describes the economic model of crime. Part III estimates cost functions for prisons.
Specific chapters cover statistical analysis of qualitative outcomes; analysis of two measures of criminal activity – the arrest rate and the conviction rate; and long-run estimates of cost functions for a group of Federal Correctional Institutions.
I’m an applied statistician and academic researcher/lecturer at New Zealand’s oldest university – the University of Otago. R facilitates everything I do – research, academic publication, and teaching. It’s the latter part of my job that motivated my own book on R. From first-year statistics students who have never seen R to my own Ph.D. students using R to implement novel and highly complex statistical methods and models, my experience is that all ultimately love the ease with which the R language permits exploration, visualisation, analysis, and inference of one’s data. The ever-growing need in today’s society for skilled statisticians and data scientists means there's never been a better time to learn this essential language.
This provides a superb balance between technical aspects of R coding and the statistical methods that motivate its use. It's rare to find a book on topics like this that are written with Kabacoff's easygoing yet precise style, which makes it ideal for beginners. From my own experience, it is obvious the author has spent many years teaching this type of content, knowing where things deserve extra explanation up front and where other more technical details can be relegated to more advanced texts.
R is a powerful language for statistical computing and graphics that can handle virtually any data-crunching task. It runs on all important platforms and provides thousands of useful specialized modules and utilities. This makes R a great way to get meaningful information from mountains of raw data.
R in Action, Second Edition is language tutorial focused on practical problems. Written by a research methodologist, it takes a direct and modular approach to quickly give readers the information they need to produce useful results. Focusing on realistic data analyses and a comprehensive integration of graphics, it follows the steps…
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I’m a historian who’s spent far too much time thinking about how the color magenta contributed to climate change and why eighteenth-century humanitarians were obsessed with tobacco enemas. My favorite historical topics—like sensation, color, and truth—don’t initially seem historical, but that’s exactly why they need to be explored. I’ve learned that the things that seem like second nature are where our deepest cultural assumptions and unconscious biases hide. In addition to writing nonfiction, I’ve been lucky enough to grow up on a ranch, live in Paris, work as an interior design writer, teach high school and college, and help stray dogs get adopted.
I had never really given much thought to counting until I read this book, but in the very first chapter, Stone made me rethink everything I thought I knew about “one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.” She shows that every time we count, we’re making cultural assumptions. For example, what counts as a fish? And what makes the color of the fish more relevant than other features? Counting reveals that while these choices may seem intuitive, basic, and meaningless, they have very real impacts on people’s lives. Especially when we use numbers to measure things like merit, poverty, race, and productivity, those fundamental assumptions matter more than we care to admit.
Early in her extraordinary career, Deborah Stone wrote Policy Paradox, a landmark work on politics. Now, in Counting, she revolutionises how we approach numbers and shows how counting shapes the way we see the world. Most of us think of counting as a skill so basic that we see numbers as objective, indisputable facts. Not so, says Stone. In this playful-yet-probing work, Stone reveals the inescapable link between quantifying and classifying, and explains how counting determines almost every facet of our lives-from how we are evaluated at work to how our political opinions are polled to whether we get into…
