Portrait of David Spiegelhalter
Reading List
David Spiegelhalter
Statistician and Professor at Cambridge · University of Cambridge
Sir David Spiegelhalter is a British statistician who held the Winton Professorship for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge, a post created to make quantitative evidence intelligible outside the academy.
His work covers clinical trials, the evaluation of medical evidence and the communication of uncertainty, and he became a familiar public voice explaining what the numbers did and did not show. The Art of Statistics (2019) sets out how to reason from data; The Norm Chronicles, written with Michael Blastland, measures everyday risk in a unit they call the micromort.
He was president of the Royal Statistical Society and was knighted for services to statistics.
Do You Feel Lucky?
The Secrets of Probability
by Kjartan Poskitt
“It is great. It is a book for secondary school kids full of cartoons and lovely characters like this filthy boy called Pongo McWhiffy, or the one I like best is an upper-class idiot called Binky Smallbrains who falls for every trick. It is a book about chance, luck and probability, and these are difficult things that people have to learn about at school. This book really cracks through it.” — via Interview, September 2011
Damned Lies and Statistics
Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists
by Joel Best
“This is written by a sociologist, so we have moved on from psychology to sociology. I like this book because one of the things that really irritates me as a statistician is when numbers are bandied around as though they are God-given truths and can’t be argued with. There is a nice quote from Joel Best that “all statistics are social products, the results of people’s efforts”.” — via Interview, September 2011
How Risky Is It, Really?
Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts
by David Ropeik
“Yes, this is a completely non-technical book, which is looking at things from the point of view of psychology. It is essentially a review of the recent research on risk perception. He is looking at how dangerous it is if we get our interpretations wrong. He uses our response to 9/11 quite a lot as an example, but he has also recently written about the response to Fukushima and nuclear risk.” — via Interview, September 2011
Dicing with Death
Chance, Risk and Health
by Stephen Senn
“This is the way that you draw conclusions from data about the underlying states of the world. Some of these arguments involve quite deep philosophical issues. For example, “What is probability?” Stephen Senn covers the different schools of statistical inference, including the so-called Bayesian inference, of which I am an enthusiast, as well as that based on [Ronald] Fisher, [Jerzy] Neyman and [Karl] Pearson.” — via Interview, September 2011
The Drunkard’s Walk
How Randomness Rules Our Lives
by Leonard Mlodinow
“For example it looks at the gamblers fallacy, where if you are betting on something like roulette and red has come up more than four times in a row, the fallacy is that black must be due to come up. That isn’t true, as long as the wheel is fair. You get that in lotteries as well, where if numbers haven’t come up for a while people feel that they must be due – which isn’t the case as there is no memory in the system.” — via Interview, September 2011