What the Luck?, Gary Smith
What the Luck?, Gary Smith
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What the Luck?
The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives

Author: Gary Smith

Narrator: Tim Andres Pabon

Unabridged: 7 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 10/01/2016


Synopsis

The newest book by the acclaimed author of Standard Deviations takes on luck, and all the mischief the idea of luck can cause in our lives.

In Israel, pilot trainees who were praised for doing well subsequently performed worse, while trainees who were yelled at for doing poorly performed better. It is an empirical fact that highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent. Students who get the highest scores in third grade generally get lower scores in fourth grade.

And yet, it's wrong to conclude that screaming is not more effective in pilot training, women choose men whose intelligence does not intimidate them, or schools are failing third graders. In fact, there's one reason for each of these empirical facts: Statistics. Specifically, a statical concept called Regression to the Mean.

Regression to the mean seeks to explain, with statistics, the role of luck in our day to day lives. An insufficient appreciation of luck and chance can wreak all kinds of mischief in sports, education, medicine, business, politics, and more. It can lead us to see illness when we are not sick and to see cures when treatments are worthless. Perfectly natural random variation can lead us to attach meaning to the meaningless.

Freakonomics showed how economic calculations can explain seemingly counterintuitive decision-making. Thinking, Fast and Slow, helped readers identify a host of small cognitive errors that can lead to miscalculations and irrational thought. In What the Luck?, statistician and author Gary Smith sets himself a similar goal, and explains--in clear, understandable, and witty prose--how a statistical understanding of luck can change the way we see just about every aspect of our lives...and can help us learn to rely less on random chance, and more on truth.

About Gary Smith

Gary Smith is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He received his PhD in economics from Yale University and was an assistant professor there for seven years. He has won two teaching awards and written (or coauthored) more than eighty academic papers and twelve books, including Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics, What the Luck?: The Surprising Role of Chance in Our Everyday Lives, and Money Machine: The Surprisingly Simple Power of Value Investing. His research has been featured by Bloomberg Radio Network, CNBC, The Brian Lehrer Show, Forbes, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Motley Fool, Newsweek, and BusinessWeek.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Patrick on August 06, 2018

[A 2.51 sort of 3 star book] What I suspect might have been an interesting chapter or two in a book about probability theory is unfortunately dragged out to make a 250 page book of its own. Maybe it would have been more interesting to someone who a) had sufficient knowledge of American sports to unde......more

Goodreads review by Richard Howard on October 02, 2018

Some books inform, some entertain, a few do both. This book manages neither to inform nor entertain. It is a deathly dull parade of statistics most of which relate to American sports, all used to hammer one single point: that statistics of all sorts regress to the mean. That's it. That's what the au......more

Goodreads review by Wilde on February 17, 2018

This book examines how chance / random events alter performance. I thought this book was quite interesting, but overall it just seem to say that things are never as good or as bad as they seem and that random events can (at the margins) determine what result is achieved.......more

Goodreads review by Chad on October 31, 2023

A thought-provoking exploration of the intricate interplay between luck and our daily experiences. Smith's compelling examples make complex statistical concepts accessible to readers of all backgrounds. Smith challenges conventional wisdom by shedding light on the extent to which randomness and luck......more

Goodreads review by Ray on December 15, 2016

The author statistically proves regression to the mean. It gets somewhat repetitious, but makes it's points that luck plays into all endeavors, such as sports, the stock market, gambling etc.......more