tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2498525082522582900.post3165018741897748984..comments2024-03-11T03:46:17.567-05:00Comments on The Wheel: Review: The Flaw of AveragesMark Stegerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02376182294736839659noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2498525082522582900.post-14506962603265586912014-02-13T17:25:28.357-06:002014-02-13T17:25:28.357-06:00Your review was spot on. As to the charge of hucks...Your review was spot on. As to the charge of hucksterism, I plead guilty on all counts. In fact on page 25, I describe how I started my career in OR (operations research) and ended up very close to where I began, in that incrementing the first letter by just one results in PR, the industrial version of hucksterism. <br /><br />I also refer to other great hucksters in the book, my favorite of whom is Fibonacci, who in 1199 sweet talked the Italians into replacing Roman Numerals with Arabic Numbers. But Fibonacci was a respected mathematician you say, who invented the famous Fibonacci sequence. The heck he did. They were invented by the Indians (1), and he used them in his book in the context of “Hey you clowns, try calculating these things with your lousy Roman Numerals.” Hucksterism at it purest. Another favorite huckster of mine was Thomas Edison, who went so far to electrocute an unfortunate elephant (2) as a publicity stunt meant to display the dangers of alternating current, favored by Westinghouse and Tesla, over his own beloved direct current.<br /><br />As to poking fun of obsolete mathematics, Catholics can tell Catholic jokes and Jews can tell Jewish jokes. As my father was a prominent mathematical statistician, and I myself was a math major, I believe I have license to poke fun at, indeed a duty to expose, layers of unnecessary mathematical complexity that are preventing people from understanding simple concepts. <br /><br />Finally on to the spreadsheet add-ins. When I wrote the book, there was no practical way to cure the Flaw of Averages in Excel without some sort of simulation software, of which I listed several competing brands. <br /><br />This is no longer true. In the summer of 2012, I discovered that the native Excel data table command was powerful enough to create interactive simulations, without macros or add-ins, in which thousands of scenarios can be run through a spreadsheet before your finger leaves the key (3). I had known about the data table for decades, but it used to crash Excel mercilessly. I am not sure when they fixed this, but it is a game changer. ProbabilityManagement.org is a non-profit that promotes the use of this approach through education, best practices and standards. <br /><br />Sam Savage, author - The Flaw of Averages<br /><br />(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci#Fibonacci_sequence<br />(2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ0WN2lGqWo<br />(3) http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/90ffcc6b#/90ffcc6b/29Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13718842875208508044noreply@blogger.com