560 pages
This book is about prediction. Like so many other books, I am probably biased here too, as I was a teaching assistant for a statistics class while in graduate school. Between elections, hurricanes, investments, and sports, everyone is suddenly interested in forecasting. And who can blame them. Predicting the future better than others usually means money. So here is to better predictions. To using percent chance, rather than binary guesses.
Two of my favorite quotes:
“Bayes’s theorem says that we should update out forecasts any time we are presented with new information. A less literal version of this idea is simply trial and error. Companies that really “get” Bid Data, like Google, aren’t spending a lot of time in model land. They’re running thousands of experiments every year and testing their ideas on real customers.”
“Staring at the ocean an waiting or a flash of insight is how ideas are generated in the movies. In the real world, they rarely come when you are standing in place. Nor do “big” ideas necessarily start out that way. It’s more often with small, incremental, and sometimes even accidental steps that we make progress.”
