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modern book by a consulting statistician on the same topic is Common Errors in Statistics and How to Avoid Them by Phillip Good and James Hardin.

previous decisions. Only 22 percent voted for option C, while 78 percent chose option D, the risky strategy. Most doctors were now acting just like Frank: they were rejecting a guaranteed gain in order to participate in a questionable gamble. Of course, this is a ridiculous shift in preference. The two different questions examine identical dilemmas

Consider the saying often attributed to Stalin that one death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is statistics.

The argument made by Bayes and Price is not that the world is intrinsically probabilistic or uncertain. Bayes was a believer in divine perfection; he was also an advocate of Isaac Newton’s work, which had seemed to suggest that nature follows regular and predictable laws. It is, rather, a statement—expressed both mathematically and philosophically—

Souvent, pour donner tout son sens à un chiffre élevé, la meilleure chose à faire est de le diviser par un certain total. Dans mon travail, ce total est souvent celui de la population totale. Quand on divise une quantité (par exemple, le nombre d’enfants à Hong Kong) par une autre (par exemple, le nombre d’écoles à Hong Kong), on arrive à un taux (

In any case, Ferguson’s prediction for the flu proved even more incorrect than his mad cow estimate. A total of forty-three people died from the H5N1 flu in 2005, according to the WHO, meaning Ferguson was off by a factor of millions.17 Yet Ferguson only became more important in the years that followed.