What are the chances of that?

What are the chances that I review a book with this title, a few months after reviewing a book called What is luck?! This one is written by Andrew Elliott, whose Is that a big number? I reviewed a wee bit earlier… And that the cover of this book involves a particularly unlucky sequence of die as in my much earlier review of Krysz Burdzy’s book? (About 10⁻⁶ less likely than the likeliest draw!)

The (relative) specificity of this book is to try to convey the notions of chance and uncertainty to the general public, more in demonstrating that our intuition is most often wrong by examples and simulations, than in delving into psychological reasons as in Barbara Blatchley’s book. The author advances five dualities that underly our (dysfunctional) relation to chance: individual vs. collective, randomness vs. meaning, foresight vs. insight, uniformity vs. variability, and disruption vs. opportunity.

“News programmes clearly understand that the testimonies of individuals draw better audiences than the summaries of statisticians.” (p. xvii)

Some of the nice features of the book  are (a) the description of a probabilistic problem at the beginning of each chapter, to be solved at the end, (b) the use of simulation experiments, represented by coloured pixels over a grey band crossing the page, including a section on pseudorandom generators [which is less confusing that the quote below may indicate!], (c) taking full advantage of the quincunx apparatus, and (d) very few apologies for getting into formulas. And even a relevant quote of Taleb’s Black Swan about the ludic fallacy. On the other hand, the author spends quite a large component of the book on chance games, exhibiting a ludic tendency! And contemplates biased coins, while he should know better! The historical sections may prove too much for both informed and uninformed readers. (However, I learned that the UK Government had used a form of lottery to pay interests on premium bonds.) And the later parts are less numerical and quantified, even though the author brings in the micromort measurement [invented by Ronald Howard and] favoured by David Spiegelhalter. Who actually appears to have inspired several other sections, like the one on coincidences (which remains quite light in its investigation!). I finished the book rather quickly by browsing though mostly anecdotes and a lesser feel of a unified discourse. I did not find the attempt to link with the COVID pandemic, which definitely resets our clocks on risk, particularly alluring…

“People go to a lot of trouble to generate truly random numbers—sequences that are impossible to predict.” (p.66)

The apparition of the Normal distribution is somewhat overdone and almost mystical, if the tone gets more reasonable by the end of the corresponding chapter.

“…combining random numbers from distributions that really have no business being added together (…) ends up with a statistic that actually fits the normal distribution quite well.” (p.83)

The part about Bayes and Bayesian reasoning does not include any inference, with a rather duh! criticism of prior modelling.

“If you are tempted to apply a group statistic derived from a broad analysis to a more narrow purpose, you run the risk of making an unfair judgement.” (p.263)

The section about Xenakis’ musical creations as a Markov process was most interesting (and novel to me). I also enjoyed the shared cultural entries, esp. literary ones. Like citing the recent Chernobyl TV drama. Or Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Or yet Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Overall, there is enough trivia and engagement to keep reading the book till its end!

Texan black swan

“Un événement improbable aux conséquences d’autant plus désastreuses que l’on ne s’y est pas préparé.”

This weekend, there was a short article in Le Monde about the Harvey storm as a Texan illustration of Taleb’s black swan. An analysis that would imply every extreme event like this “once-in-a-thousand year” event (?) can be called a black swan… “An improbable event with catastrophic consequences, the more because it had not been provisioned”, as the above quote translates. Ironically, there is another article in the same journal, about the catastrophe being “ordinary” and “not unexpected”! While such massive floods are indeed impacting a huge number of people and companies, because the storm happened to pour an unusual amount of rain right on top of Houston, they indeed remain within the predictable and not so improbable in terms of the amount of water deposited in the area and in terms of damages, given the amount and style of construction over flood plains. For instance, Houston is less than 50 feet above sea level, has fairly old drainage and pipe systems, and lacks a zoning code. With mostly one or two-story high buildings rather than higher rises. (Incidentally, I appreciated the juxtaposition of the article with the add for Le Monde des Religions and its picture of a devilesque black goat!)

 

book based on a single well-known concept [smbc repost]

the latest Significance: Astrostats, black swans, and pregnant drivers [and zombies]

Reading Significance is always an enjoyable moment, when I can find time to skim through the articles (before my wife gets hold of it!). This time, I lost my copy between my office and home, and borrowed it from Tom Nichols at Warwick with four mornings to read it during breakfast. This December issue is definitely interesting, as it contains several introduction articles on astro- and cosmo-statistics! One thing I had not noticed before is how a large fraction of the papers is written by authors of books, giving a quick entry or interview about their book. For instance, I found out that Roberto Trotta had written a general public book called the Edge of the Sky (All You Need to Know About the All-There-Is) which exposes the fundamentals of cosmology through the 1000 most common words in the English Language.. So Universe is replaced with All-There-Is! I can understand and to some extent applaud the intention, but it nonetheless makes for a painful read, judging from the excerpt, when researcher and telescope are not part of the accepted vocabulary. Reading the corresponding article in Significance let me a bit bemused at the reason provided for the existence of a multiverse, i.e., of multiple replicas of our universe, all with different conditions: multiplying the universes makes our more likely, while it sounds almost impossible on its own! This sounds like a very frequentist argument… and I am not even certain it would convince a frequentist. The other articles in this special astrostatistics section were of a more statistical nature, from estimating the number of galaxies to the chances of a big asteroid impact. Even though I found the graphical representation of the meteorite impacts in the past century because of the impact drawing in the background. However, when I checked the link to Carlo Zapponi’s website, I found the picture was a still of a neat animation of meteorites falling since the first report.

on the Piketty craze [not a book review]

The controversy about the data in Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century fed a dozen articles in the NYT last week, not to mention other newspapers… To the point of Bloomberg producing this parody of a glitzy popular press cover. I have not read the book, nor intend to read it, but I find the buzz and controversies rather surprising. (Thomas Piketty will actually give a public BBC interview in Paris-Dauphine and in English two weeks from now, on June 19.) Indeed, the book sounds to me like a data analysis of extensive (and elaborately processed) datasets rather than the construct of a new economic theory. And I could not see how the criticisms from the Financial Time were anywhere beyond the obvious ideological.  I was thus pleased to read Francis Diebold’s blog on this craze. And to see the repeated acknowledgements that Piketty’s data being made public was a great thing. Although somewhat dismayed that such a painstakenly gathered dataset was not submitted to a more advanced econometric/statistical processing than the one offered by Excel… Definitely looking forward a more [statistically] involved analysis  of the data. (Unsurprisingly, Nassim Taleb reanalysed the whole craze as missing the fat tail features of wealth accumulation. With new aphorisms like “the fastest road to bankruptcy in foreign exchange was an economics degree”.)