A Reading List for Stats Fans

Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia University, offers some reading suggestions for fans of statistics (no, they are not as numerous as fans of, say, Harry Potter, but still …). On his list: The Bill James Baseball Abstracts, Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, How Animals Work, The Honest Rainmaker and How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. “The math that we can all understand from high school is just not going to be enough to capture the interesting features of real world patterns,” says Gelman. “Statistics, however, can capture a lot more patterns at a less technical level, because statistics, unlike mathematics, is all about uncertainty and variation. So all the books that I thought of, they’re all non-technical, but they’re all about variation and comparison and patterns.” [%comments]