Statistics
An annotated collection of 8 books & papers on statistics, spanning 2012 to 2025. Featuring works by Nate Silver, Charles Wheelan, Andy Field and 5 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't
Silver surveys forecasting across domains — baseball, weather, politics, earthquakes, economics, chess — and catalogues the systematic ways predictions fail. The book's strongest chapter, on Bayesian reasoning, is a cras…
Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data
Wheelan's book is a popular statistics primer for readers who survived a bad statistics class. He covers the fundamentals — distributions, correlation, regression, significance, sampling — with enough examples that the f…
An Adventure in Statistics: The Reality Enigma
Andy Field teaches statistics inside a sci-fi novel — a graphic-novel narrative frame in which statistical concepts are introduced as the protagonist needs them. The gimmick works: concepts that are dry in most textbooks…
Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing
Kohavi ran experimentation at Amazon, Microsoft and LinkedIn; Tang and Xu built Google's and LinkedIn's. Between them they have run tens of thousands of experiments, and the book condenses that experience into a practica…
Piensa claro: Ocho reglas para descifrar el mundo
Llaneras es periodista de datos en El País y doctor en ingeniería, y el libro es su intento de enseñar pensamiento estadístico a lectores no técnicos — ocho reglas para evitar las trampas más comunes al interpretar datos…
Statistical Thinking for the 21st Century
Poldrack is a Stanford neuroscientist who wrote an open-source statistics textbook because he was tired of what was available for his own students. The book covers the fundamentals — probability, hypothesis testing, regr…
GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods
Brynjolfsson and colleagues tackle the central measurement problem of the digital economy: how do you account for the welfare value of free products like search engines, social networks, or smartphone apps that never app…
Measuring Social Media Network Effects
The first rigorous empirical measurement of what social media platforms are actually worth to users — $78-101 per month per person — with the crucial insight that 20-34% of that value comes from network effects rather th…