Series
Numbers
Our intuitions about numbers are confidently, systematically wrong, and there's a body of maths whose whole job is to correct them: how statistics mislead, why probability defies common sense, why the other queue always moves, how routes get optimised, how to run an honest experiment, how a poll reads a nation from a sample, why randomness can't be compressed, and why numbers have a hidden shape. Part of Under the Hood.
How Statistics Lie
A statistic can be perfectly true and still deceive you completely, and the best ones do exactly that, every number accurate, the conclusion wrong. The most common deceptions aren't fabricated data; they're true numbers framed, averaged, or correlated in ways that lead the mind exactly where the presenter wants. Learning the handful of standard tricks is the closest thing there is to a vaccine against being fooled by figures.
Coming soon