Who's Counting?
Uniting Numbers and Narratives with Stories from Pop Culture, Puzzles, Politics, and More
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Descrição da editora
For decades, New York Times best-selling author John Allen Paulos has enlightened readers by showing how to make sense of the numbers and probabilities behind real-world events, political calculations, and everyday personal decisions. Who’s Counting? features dozens of his insightful essays—original writings on contemporary issues like the COVID-19 pandemic, online conspiracy theories, “fake news,” and climate change, as well as a selection of enduring columns from his popular ABC News column of the same name.
With an abiding respect for reason, a penchant for puzzles with societal implications, and a disarming sense of humor, Paulos does in this collection what he’s famous for: clarifies mathematical ideas for everyone and shows how they play a role in government, media, popular culture, and life. He argues that if we can’t critically interpret numbers and statistics, we lose one of our most basic and reliable guides to reality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Paulos (Innumeracy), a professor of math at Temple University, comes up short in this somewhat dusty treatise on why "numbers, probabilities, and logic are, along with a humble respect for truth, our most basic and reliable guides to reality." He proposes some puzzles for would-be presidents to attempt (to winnow down the candidates), breaks down probability with the help of baseball cards, and considers the conjunction fallacy, or "the tendency we have to attribute plausibility to scenarios with many extraneous details." However, the book is largely a collection of columns Paulos wrote between 2000 and 2010 for ABC News, along with excerpts from some of his other books, including Irreligion (published in 2008), and the dated material feels, well, dated. Paulos writes that his source material is "still informative despite superficial anachronisms that I beg the reader to ignore," but the 20-year-old references to George W. Bush and Al Gore's economic debates and 2003's Total Information Awareness program tend to stick out. As well, several sections feel like fluff, such as a hypothetical conversation between Groucho Marx and Bertrand Russell and an instant message exchange with God. This one doesn't add up to much.
