Willful Ignorance

Mentions per year

What Hacker News says

• kqr · Sep 19, 2022 · Recommends

  …outcome, whatever outcome you wish for, is how to avoid getting the same result over and over while thinking you ought to see something different because gosh-darned if you aren't trying really hard!! = Willful Ignorance by Weisberg. This isn't that good a book, in that it doesn't cover very much content at all, but it really gave me a good intuition for what statistics and probability is about that has helped me understand…

  on “Ask HN: Name 3-5 books that had the most impact on your career and knowledge?” ↗
• jtsuken · Jun 26, 2021 · Recommends

  …with some practical examples. 4) Entropy and Information by Volkenstein a Soviet popular science book with math-heavy examples from biology, chemistry and physics and as an aside I can also recommend "Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty" by Weisberg, which is an engaging history review of probability theory and its key inventors

  on “Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction” ↗
• kqr · Apr 8, 2026 · Mentions

  …(However, if it existed in the Americas earlier than that, that would explain why it suddenly popped up in Europe in the 1600s...) ---- Important edit: What I know about this comes mostly from Weisberg's Willful Ignorance as well as A World of Chance by Brenner, Brenner, and Brown. These authors' research is based mostly on European written sources, meaning the emphasis is on how Europeans used to think about this. It's…

  on “Native Americans had dice 12,000 years ago” ↗
• kqr · Aug 20, 2024 · Mentions

  I think I got most of this from Willful Ignorance (Weisberg, 2014) but it was a while since I read it (and this was before I made more detailed notes) so I might be misremembering. There are what looks like fantastic books on the early days of probability…

  on “Uniqueness Bias: Why it matters, how to curb it” ↗
• chmsky00 · Oct 3, 2021 · Mentions

  It would be nice if the era of economic theory were to end. Herbert Weisberg argues in Willful Ignorance (paraphrasing for brevity; read and come to your own conclusions) we’re using statistical and probabilistic tools in economics that were purposely left crude by the mathematicians that defined them, as…

  on “Nobody Really Knows How the Economy Works. A Fed Paper Is the Latest Sign” ↗