300-Character Book Reviews

Erudition for the easily-distracted, or your money back.

Introduction

Here are the extremely brief reviews of data analysis and visualization related books that I occasionally post on Bluesky.

The Theory That Would Not Die (McGrayne, 2011)

Brings its heroes and villains to life with charming short biographies, but mangles the statistical ideas.

“Fisher considered a hypothesis significant if it was unlikely to have occurred by chance”? Hypotheses don’t “occur” at all!

References

• The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, & Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy