Risk Savvy: how to make good decisions.
Penguin. 2014
There are two main points made in this book.
Firstly, you need to use a different reasoning process about situations where you know the risks and their odds, and the uncertain situations where you don’t; and you need to be able to distinguish these cases. In the case of uncertainty, rules of thumb are usually better than trying to calculate unknown odds. Gigerenzer gives some examples. I particularly liked his discussion of the real Monty Hall problem, rather than the “tidied up” version used for probability calculations. The real situation is much messier, and I have pointed out that you need to know the full rules beforehand: the stated solution works only if the host doesn’t cheat.
Secondly, even when the odds and risks are known, most statistics are so badly presented, possibly to make better headlines, that even the experts don’t understand what they say; you need to look at the real underlying rates. Behaviour X doubles the chance of cancer Y may not be a problem, if the chance of cancer Y is extremely small in the first place. Gigerenzer gives examples of a way to present rates rather than conditional probabilities that makes it much easier to see and understand the true risks.
There are many good cases discussed in here, with a large chunk of the book given over to healthcare. For example, there is a lot about medical screening, false positives, and increased “survival” rates being due entirely to earlier diagnosis, and nothing to do with living longer in total if diagnosed earlier (“lead time bias”). Survival rates are different from mortality rates.
Some of the discussions do feel a little disjointed. In particular, there is early emphasis on how most real world issues deal with uncertainty (rules of thumb) rather than risk (calculating odds), yet much of the book is on increasing statistical literacy. No matter; there is much good material in here.
For all my book reviews, see my main website.
No comments:
Post a Comment