Super Freaky

I finished the book SuperFreakonomics a couple of days ago. I had read Freakonomics when it first came out and remembered liking it a lot. I wish I were the type of person who had a better memory for details, because both of these books are chock full of interesting things that make great conversation. The book is written by a couple of economists (I think) that research some commonplace things (like prostitution, altruistic behavior and global warming) and then look at the research through different eyes. The eyes of an economist. Now from what I gleaned, apparently an economist has more scientific method than the scientists do. Much of the research was done by scientists testing a hypothesis, but these guys just interpreted the data differently, or compiled other data and added that to their conclusions. At any rate, it is very interesting to see how easy it is to spin the data to make it support whatever conclusion you hold near and dear to your heart. Being a math person, I know that statistics is the least "pure" of the mathematical areas precisely because of this scenario. John Allen Paulos wrote several books in fact that discuss how statistics are manipulated by the media to make their case and since the general public is not as numerate as they are literate, they tend to take the statistics for granted. They read the words written, assume the statistics are set in stone and that it is an irrefutable fact since it is in print. I can't say that I believe every single conclusion these authors set out to claim, HOWEVER I give them huge kudos for pointing out the fact that there are many factors to consider and to conduct many experiments, or look at many different groups of data before claiming one as truth. Another author who wrote several books that I put in this same category is Malcolm Gladwell. He wrote The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. Again, good fodder for those of us with a hint of conspiracy theory blood in our veins and who are willing to question the facts as presented to us.

I've been toying with the idea of adding my own rating scale. Being a math person, I want to choose a scale that will be meaningful. The scale from 1 to 5 seems to me to not have enough range to fully differentiate between the levels of "like" and "really like". So I think I will try a scale from 1 to 10 and see how that goes.

SuperFreakonomics
Finished February 1, 2012
Rating:  8
Comments: Easy to read and understand. Good bathroom reading if you are into that kind of thing.