Book Review - The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver

This is basically a review in two parts. One of them covers the rest of the book and the other covers the last chapter. You'll see why I had to do this later.

I've always liked stats (and it rescued me from absolute failure at A-Level maths), but that also means I'm well aware that it can be used to confuse rather than illuminate. The book appealed to me as Nate Silver seems to be the stats wonk du jour and it always nice to see stats at work.

Reading it also caused me great amusement when the Guardian started up their series of pieces on football statistical journalism. Because it wasn't quite lifted directly from but both the order and the shape of the ideas were blatantly straight lifts from The Signal and the Noise.

( The first part of the review )

Overall, if the book had stopped at the penultimate chapter, I would have been happy to give it a 4/5.

Unfortunately, it doesn't.

( The second part of the review )

The last chapter is so bad it drags my overall rating down to 3.

( LibraryThing Suggester )

Black Swan is on my to be read eventually radar.