good sequel to Innumeracy appropriate for news readers and writers

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	• A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper John Allen Paulos Anchor, 1997 - 224 pages average customer review:based on 32 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

THE VIRTUE OF QUANTITATIVE SELFISHNESS

As a mathematician who has, in the past year, been reading a few volumes of Ayn Rand and who has a degree of familiarity with the works of John Allen Paulos, including A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, I have wondered how Rand and Paulos would have gotten along with each other. In a day and age where many have turned to faith or reason, where the former seems to more frequently be exclusive of the latter, there are numerous affinities that can be characterized between the two authors, both of whom have asserted to be on the side of reason. In the review of this book, I will try to draw out these similarities while assuming that I am one of the first at this particular attempt.

A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper is a getting back to basics reference to helping one interpret his or her surroundings from both empirical and metaphysical points of view. Where Rand's philosophy of Objectivist Ethics provides sound arguments on why people should try to be rational thinkers as opposed to mere altruists who defer their opinions and conclusions to those of others, Paulos' mathematical logic in this book provides applications on how rationalism can be a guide to enable one's discernment between what is fact and what is misinformation.

I do not know John Allen Paulos' view on philosophy, but I think that, with his expertise in mathematics and mathematics' presence in the real world, his works, so far, have, in their own feasible way, supplemented the ideological and social constructs developed by Ayn Rand and those belonging to her particular think tanks. Why? Because, like Rand during her day, Paulos has academically crusaded against anti-intellectual, collectivist dogmas.

Just as Rand endorsed the establishment of an objectivist philosophy to form the best of arguments and conclusions on the basis of utilizing the highest levels of reasoning, Paulos, in this book, has emphasized the field of mathematics in the same regard. From both schools of thought, objectivist philosophy and mathematics, have been wars declared on fearmongers, feel good doctors and snake oil salesmen who use emotionally driven ideologies that ultimately disappoint and faulty statistics to deceive the masses, whether intentional or not.

Where one in the humanities might cite cases of altruism and the abandonment of reason in the context of placing blind faith in the manifestos of how society should be, Paulos warns that the same parallels can occur in mathematics, where one can be deceived into thinking that what are direct, cause and effect correlations are actually apples and oranges comparisons. Throughout A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Paulos uses examples that seem nonmathematical, such as racism, crime, everyday gossip, drug testing, etc. and demonstrates how a lack of mathematical understanding can hinder one's total perspective of the aforementioned.

In conclusion, I would like to say that Paulos, with the themes and tones set in A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, has carried on the works of many an outstanding scholar and has left words of admonition fit for those absolutist, intellectual elites who claim to have all the answers in the domains of their respective fields. They are as follows: "Always be smart; seldom be certain...Whether we admit it or not, it seems that we all tend to rise to our level of uncertainty. We master the easy links, the local correspondences, the ways to get by...New understanding develops, but we tend to keep pushing until we come up against social and physical phenomena that are too complex for us to grasp or foresee in any detail."

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Would make a good discussion book in all kinds of classes

This is a more accessible exposition of his ideas in his previous book, `Innumeracy'. It consists of a very eclectic collection of short essays that I think can be illuminating in a myriad of class settings: science, critical thinking, philosophy, math, and journalism, to name some.

By its nature, however, it can be somewhat redundant. Also, the point of a good number of the essays seemed elusive at first reading. I found a lot of his footnotes more interesting and worthy of further discussion, and would've liked them to become expanded into their own essay.

Besides the print media, his criticism and advice can be suitably applied to the electronic media and beyond.

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Excellent book

I love this book. It gives concrete numbers to common sense -- and not-so-common sense. I particularly liked how Paulos uses examples from all areas of life. The political/voting section is especially interesting!

good sequel to Innumeracy appropriate for news readers and writers

This 1995 Paulos book is written in the form of a newspaper, with many short chapters not particularly related to each other, grouped into sections--politics, economics, and the nation; local, business, and social issues; lifestyle, spin, and soft news; science, medicine, and the environment; and food, book reviews, sports, obituaries. Each chapter is headed with an actual newspaper headline that bears some relation to the topic discussed.

The book has a few minor repetitions from Paulos' other works, but is mostly new material. It is entertainingly written and informative, providing useful information about how to critically analyze a wide variety of subjects, suitable for both readers and writers of newspapers and other forms of news reporting, including blogs.

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When did you last read the Newspaper?

"Don't believe everything you read in the papers" - more or less sums up what John Allen Paulos says in this Mathematician's eye-view of the printed news. But I would take that caveat a step further - especially in the light of today's news media: "Don't believe what you hear or see either!" Mainstream media it seems, is way to easy to manipulate, subjugate and otherwise coerce into only telling stories which the powers-that-be want the people to hear. Who decides what is written about? Who decides what ends up on television? This book was written at a time when the Internet was not quite the ubiquitous source of information it is today. Heck, in 1995 - even to someone like me, the word "Amazon" still conjured up the image of a lush, steamy rainforest somewhere in South America. In this light, the book represents a sort of snapshot of history in the days when people still had a modicum of respect for print on pulp from (possibly) rainforest trees, delivered every morning to their doorsteps. Strangely enough, this book may even serve as an epitaph to the Newspaper itself.

The book is actually structured like a regular newspaper, however with insightful (if a little mathematical) criticism by the author himself. You won't need a degree to understand what he is saying, however you will require some basic (High School level) knowledge of Statistics and Probability. John A.Paulos is a Ph.D. in Mathematical Logic - and thus he frames most of his arguments in an Aristotelian fashion, avoiding the cryptographic symbolism which pollutes (or, clarifies?) modern day mathematics. In short, you can read this book without a pencil and paper. What makes the book delightful however, is the author's ever-present sense of humor (which I suspect is a little funnier to those with some mathematical background themselves!)

The only problem I have with this book is the subject matter itself. I do believe that eventually, newspapers will go the way of the dinosaur. And maybe in another 65 million years or so, sapient beings will wonder at how strangely attached our minds were to the woody pulp of Amazonian trees.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

With the same user-friendly, quirky, and perceptive approach that made Innumeracy a bestseller, John Allen Paulos travels though the pages of the daily newspaper showing how math and numbers are a key element in many of the articles we read every day. From the Senate, SATs, and sex, to crime, celebrities, and cults, he takes stories that may not seem to involve mathematics at all and demonstrates how a lack of mathematical knowledge can hinder our understanding of them.

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