Art, Artfulness, or Artifice?: A Review of The Art of Statistics: How to Learn From Data, by David Spiegelhalter

• Main Author: Jason Makansi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: National Numeracy Network 2020-01-01
• Series: Numeracy
• Subjects: statistics; quantitative literacy; data; critical thinking
• Online Access: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol13/iss1/art9

David Spiegelhalter. 2019. The Art of Statistics: How to Learn From Data. (London: The Penguin Group). 444 pp. ISBN 978-1541618510 The author successfully eases the reader away from the rigor of statistical methods and calculations and into the realm of statistical thinking. Despite an engaging style and attention-grabbing examples, the reader of The Art of Statistics will need more than a casual grounding in statistics to get what Spiegelhalter, I believe, intends from his book. It should be viewed as a companion to a more rigorous textbook on statistical methods but not necessarily a book that makes statistics any less complicated for the uninitiated.