Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception

Permit me to briefly interrupt my series of postings on our Alaska vacation. Last night I finished a book that I want to bring to your attention. Entitled Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception, the book is an extremely interesting (in my humble opinion) treatment of the ways in which numbers influence us as individuals and of the ways in which they are abused and misused by others to influence us. The book was written by Charles Seife. A good review of the book appeared in the New York Times, which you can read by clicking here.

Mr. Seife presents the idea that when we hear a claim made and backed up by a number, we tend to believe the claim more readily, simply because we take numbers to be cold, hard and objective. He then goes on to describe the various ways in which we can be misled by numbers. A simple example is when someone simply makes up a number to support a claim, as did Joe McCarthy when he started his anti-communist campaign by saying, "I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department." Mr. Seife also gives a very nice treatment of the techniques of mathematical correlation and explains how we tend to assume there are cause and effect links between the correlated data even when no such links can exist. (Just because two concepts can be correlated does not mean that one causes the other.) Other topics include measurement error, statistical methods, and cherry picking (selectively choosing from the available data so as to force a particular conclusion).

I know what you are thinking, "Obviously this book would appeal to Bill. He's a math guy." Maybe, but you really don't have to be a math person to understand the concepts, and please consider that the best part of the book is that after helping us to understand the several ways in which uses of numbers can be abused, Mr. Seife presents a series of fascinating discussions of examples of such abuses, including public opinion polls, financial fraud, voting practices, judicial failures, and propaganda.

The book is a quick read at only 295 pages, and I think you will find it difficult to put down. I highly recommend it. Go back and read the New York Times review. If all of us, as citizens, were more aware of these issues, I suspect we would do better jobs of holding elected and public officials, campaigners, and businesses accountable.