John Allen Paulos
"Innumeracy" and "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper"
Amazon.com writes about this book: In the tradition of Innumeracy by
John Allen Paulos, German scientist Gerd Gigerenzer offers his own
take on numerical illiteracy. "In Western countries, most children
learn to read and write, but even in adulthood, many people do not
know how to think with numbers," he writes. "I focus on the most
important form of innumeracy in everyday life, statistical
innumeracy--that is, the inability to reason about uncertainties and
risk." The author wisely uses concrete examples from the real world to
make his points, and he shows the devastating impact of this
problem. In one example, he describes a surgeon who advised many of
his patients to accept prophylactic mastectomies in order to dodge
breast cancer. In a two-year period, this doctor convinced 90
"high-risk" women without cancer to sacrifice their breasts "in a
heroic exchange for the certainty of saving their lives and protecting
their loved ones from suffering and loss." But Gigerenzer shows that
the vast majority of these women (84 of them, to be exact) would not
have developed breast cancer at all. If the doctor or his patients had
a better understanding of probabilities, they might have chosen a
different course. Fans of Innumeracy will enjoy Calculated Risks, as
will anyone who appreciates a good puzzle over numbers. --John Miller