Fagone on Cash WinFall

Great, thoroughly reported piece by Jason Fagone (author of The Woman Who Smashed Codes, which everybody says is great) about the Cash WinFall Massachusetts lottery story, which I wrote about at length in How Not To Be Wrong.  My chapter focused on a group of MIT students who became high-volume bettors; Fagone spends more time with Michigan retiree Jerry Selbee, and gets lots of information on the story I wasn’t able to uncover.  That’s why it’s good to have an actual journalist cover these stories!

Portuguese vs. Portuguese

The Portuguese edition of “How Not To Be Wrong” just arrived at my house.  “Portuguese” as in “from Portugal” and as distinct from the Brazilian edition.  Interesting how two versions of the book in the same language can be rather different!  Here’s the opening paragraph in Portugal:

Agora mesmo, numa sala de aula algures no mundo, uma estudante esta a reclamar com o seu professor de matematica.  Este acabou de lhe pedir para usar uma parte substancial do seu fim de semana a calcular uma lista de trinta integrais definidas.

And in Brazil:

Neste exato momento, numa sala de aula em algum lugar do mundo, uma aluna esta xingando o professor de matematica.  O professor acaba de lhe pedir que passe uma parte substancial de seu fim de semana calculando uma lista de trinta integrais definidas.

Ok, those are not too far off.  Here’s how some lines of John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended” are translated in Portugal:

E vimos que ambos temos razao, ainda que nada

Tenha resultado em coisa alguma; os avatares

Do nosso conformismo perante as regros,

E ficar sempre por casa, fizeram de nos — bem, en certo sentido — <<bons cidadaos>>

and in Brazil:

Esta vendo, ambos estavamos certos, embora nada

Tenha de algum modo chegado a nada; os avatares

Da nossa comformidade com regras e viver

Em torno de casa fizeram de nos … bem, num sentido, “bons cidadaos”

I don’t know whether Ashbery’s poems have official Portuguese translations.  The only one I could find of “Soonest Mended” was in a book of criticism by V.B. Concagh, where the last two lines were rendered

Deste conformarmo-nos as regras e fazermos a nossa vida

Ca por casa fizeram de nos — bem, num certo sentido, “bons cidadaos”

The line I hit very hard in English is  “For this is action, this not being sure.”  That last phrase is rendered

• (Portugal) esta incerteza
• (Brazil) essa falta de certeza
• (Concagh) este nao esta seguro

I don’t read Portuguese but the last, most literal rendering seems best to me, assuming I’m right that it captures something of the “not the way you’d normally say it”-ness of the Ashbery:  “this uncertainty” or “this lack of certainty” in English don’t have at all the same quality.

Note:  Because I was feeling lazy I have omitted all diacritical marks.  Lusophones are welcome to hassle me about this if it makes the quotes ambiguous or unreadable.

 

How Not To Be Wrong update

Big month for How Not To Be Wrong, by the way!  Bill Gates picked the book as one of his five summer reads, and wrote a really nice review on his blog.  It turns out Bill Gates is basically the nerdy Oprah!  Sales spiked at his signal.  (Interesting fact:  the week after his post was the first week ever that we sold more e-books than physical ones.)  Penguin printed a bunch more copies and since then the book has been selling at a level it hasn’t hit since it first came out.  This week, more than a year after publication, the paperback enters the New York Times best seller list at #8.  That’s crazy!

In other news:  the book has now been published in Brazil, Italy, Japan, China, Taiwan, and Korea.  Editions planned for France, Spain, Hungary, Finland, Russia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Portugal, and Turkey.

 

Devil math!

The Chinese edition of How Not To Be Wrong, published by CITAC and translated by Xiaorui Hu, comes out in a couple of weeks.

The Chinese title is

魔鬼数学

or

“Mo gui shu xue”

which means “Devil mathematics”!  Are they saying I’m evil?  Apparently not.  My Chinese informants tell me that in this context “Mo gui” should be read as “magical/powerful and to some extent to be feared” but not necessarily evil.

One thing I learned from researching this is that the Mogwai from Gremlins are just transliterated “Mo gui”!  So don’t let my book get wet, and definitely don’t read it after midnight.

HNTBW paperback publicity roundup

Gonna put all this stuff in one post:

I was at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, talking about various aspects of outward-facing math.  We taped an episode of Science Friday with Jo Boaler and Steve Strogatz, mostly about K-12 teaching, but I did get to drop Russell’s paradox on the audience.  I also did a discussion with David Leonhardt, editor of the New York Times Upshot section, about the future of quantitative journalism, and sat on a big panel that debated the question:  “Is Math Important?”

The big news from England was that Waterstone’s chose HNTBW as their nonfiction book of the month for June.  That was a big factor in the book riding the Times bestseller list for a month (it’s the #5 nonfiction paperback as I write this.) I went to London and did some events, like this talk at the Royal Institution.  I also got to meet Matt Parker, “the stand-up mathematician,” and record a spirited discussion of whether 0.9999… = 1 (extra director’s cut footage here.) And I wrote a piece for the Waterstone’s blog about the notorious “Hannah and her sweets problem.” from this year’s GCSE.

I was on Bloomberg News, very briefly, to talk about my love for dot plot charts and to tell a couple of stories from the book.  (Rare chance to see me in a blazer.) On the same trip to New York, I sat in on the Slate Money podcast.  I also wrote a couple of op-eds, some already linked here:  In the New York Times, I wrote about states replacing Common Core math standards with renamed versions of the same thing, and in the Wall Street Journal, I talked about the need for a new kind of fact-checking for data journalism, where truth is not enough.

The book just came out in Brazil this month; good luck for me, I was already invited to a conference at IMPA, so while I was there I gave a talk at Casa do Saber in Rio, talking through a translator like I was at the UN.

I think that’s about it!

 

Translator’s notes

The Brazilian edition of How Not To Be Wrong, with its beautiful cover, just showed up at my house.  One of the interesting things about leafing through it is reading the translator’s notes, which provide explanations for words and phrases that will be mysterious to Brazilian readers.  E.G.:

• yeshiva
• Purim
• NCAA
• Affordable Care Act
• Rube Goldberg
• home run
• The Tea Party (identified by the translator as “radical wing of the Republican party”
• “likely voters” — translator notes that “in the United States, voting is not obligatory”
• home run (again!)
• RBI (charmingly explained as “run battled in”)

I am also proud to have produced, on two separate occasions, a “trocadilho intraduzivel do ingles” (untranslatable English pun)

 

I will never find all the bad sentences

Even now, a year after the book came out, two weeks before the paperback arrives, I’m still finding bad sentences in it.  The one I just noticed:

It was scary when a statistical model deployed by the Guest Marketing Analytics team at Target correctly inferred based on purchasing data that one of its customers—sorry, guests—a teenaged girl in Minnesota, was pregnant, based on an arcane formula involving elevated rates of buying unscented lotion, mineral supplements, and cotton balls.

I must have written “based on purchasing data” and then tried it again in a higher pitch with “based on an arcane formula … cotton balls” but forgotten to take out the original, leaving a sentence with a weird, redundant double “based on.”  Who knows how many mistakes like this are left in the final text?  How many will I never catch?

HNTBW covers: Italy and Brazil

The first foreign editions of How Not To Be Wrong are coming out!  Italy is first, this week:

 

And after that, Brazil in June:

More pie than plate, Dane County edition

One chapter of How Not To Be Wrong, called “More Pie Than Plate” (excerpted in Slate here) is about the perils you are subject to when you talk about percentages of numbers (like “net new jobs”) that may be negative.

Various people, since the book came out, have complained that How Not To Be Wrong is a leftist tract, intended to smear Republicans as being bad at math.  I do not in fact think Republicans are bad at math and it sort of depresses me to feel my book reads that way to those people.  What’s true is that, in “More Pie Than Plate,”  I tear down an old Mitt Romney ad and a Scott Walker press release.  But the example I lead with is a claim almost always put forward by liberal types:  that the whole of the post-recession rebound has accrued to the 1%.  Not really true!

Long intro to this: I get to polish my “calling out liberal claims” cred by objecting to this, from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

UW-Madison, the fourth-largest academic research institution in the country with $1.1 billion of annual research spending, has helped spur strong job growth in surrounding Dane County. In fact, employment gains there during the last 10 years far outstrip those in any other Wisconsin county, accounting for more than half of the state’s 36,941 net new private-sector jobs.

I’m pro-UW and pro-Dane County, obviously, but people need to stop reporting percentages of net job gains.  What’s more — the reason job gains here outstrip other counties is that it’s the second-biggest county in the state, with a half-million people.  Credit to the Journal-Sentinel; at least they included a table, so you can see for yourself that lots of other counties experienced healthy job growth over the decade.

But just as I was ready to placate my conservative critics, Rick Perry went to Iowa and said:

“In the last 14 years, Texas has created almost one-third of all the new jobs in America.”

Dane County and Rick Perry, you both have to stop reporting percentages of net job gains.

Michael Harris on Elster on Montaigne on Diagoras on Abraham Wald

Michael Harris — who is now blogging! — points out that Montaigne very crisply got to the point I make in How Not To Be Wrong about survivorship bias, Abraham Wald, and the missing bullet holes:

Here, for example, is how Montaigne explains the errors in reasoning that lead people to believe in the accuracy of divinations: “That explains the reply made by Diagoras, surnamed the Atheist, when he was in Samothrace: he was shown many vows and votive portraits from those who have survived shipwrecks and was then asked, ‘You, there, who think that the gods are indifferent to human affairs, what have you to say about so many men saved by their grace?’— ‘It is like this’, he replied, ‘there are no portraits here of those who stayed and drowned—and they are more numerous!’ ”

The quote is from Jon Elster, Reason and Rationality, p.26.