Proofiness - How You're Being Fooled by the Numbers

Zusatztext "A delightful and remarkably revealing book that should be required reading for . . . well! for everyone." - Booklist (Starred review) Informationen zum Autor Charles Seife is the author of five previous books, including Proofiness and Zero, which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first nonfiction and was a New York Times notable book. He has written for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, Wired, New Scientist, Science, Scientific American, and The Economist . He is a professor of journalism at New York University and lives in New York City.     Klappentext From the author of Zero, comes this "admirable salvo against quantitative bamboozlement by the media and the government" (The Boston Globe) In Zero, Charles Seife presented readers with a thrilling account of the strangest number known to humankind. Now he shows readers how the power of skewed metrics-or "proofiness"- is being used to alter perception in both amusing and dangerous ways. Proofiness is behind such bizarre stories as a mathematical formula for the perfect butt and sprinters who can run faster than the speed of sound. But proofiness also has a dark side: bogus mathematical formulas used to undermine our democracy-subverting our justice system, fixing elections, and swaying public opinion with lies. By doing the real math, Seife elegantly and good-humoredly scrutinizes our growing obsession with metrics while exposing those who misuse them. 1 Phony Facts, Phony Figures Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. —John Adams Facts are stupid things. —Ronald Reagan If you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it. Even the silliest absurdities seem plausible the moment that they’re expressed in numerical terms. Are blonds an endangered species? A few years ago, the media were all abuzz about a World Health Organization study proving that natural blonds would soon be a thing of the past. The BBC declared that people with blond hair “will become extinct by 2202.” Good Morning America told its viewers that natural blonds will “vanish from the face of the earth within two hundred years” because the blond gene is “not as strong a gene as brunettes’.” The story was winging its way around the globe until the WHO issued an unusual statement: WHO wishes to clarify that it has never conducted research on this subject. Nor, to the best of its knowledge, has WHO issued a report predicting that natural blondes are likely to be extinct by 2202. WHO has no knowledge of how these news reports originated but would like to stress that we have no opinion on the future existence of blondes. It should have been obvious that the story was bogus, even before the WHO denial. One geneticist had even told the BBC as much. “Genes don’t die out unless there is a disadvantage to having that gene,” he said. “They don’t disappear.” But the BBC had suspended its faculties of disbelief. The reason, in part, was because of a phony number. The specificity, the seeming mathematical certainty of the prediction of when the last blond would be born, gave the story an aura of plausibility. It suckered journalists who should have known better. No matter how idiotic, how unbelievable an idea is, numbers can give it credibility. “Fifty-eight percent of all the exercise done in America is broadcast on television,” MSNBC host Deborah Norville declared in 2004, with a completely straight face. “For instance, of the 3.5 billion sit-ups done during 2003, two million, three hundred thousand [sic] of them were on exercise shows.” Without once pausing to think, Norville swallowed the bogus statistics and regurgi...

Product details

• Authors: Charles Seife
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 27.09.2011
• EAN: 9780143120070
• ISBN: 978-0-14-312007-0
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 201 mm x 15 mm
• Subjects: Guides; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Mathematics > General, dictionaries