weaselweader's review against another edition
4.0
You might want to re-think that last bet you made!
Talk about niche marketing! Conned Again, Watson is a pretty difficult book to categorize. Perhaps the sub-title does a fair job of letting a potential reader know what it's all about - "cautionary tales of logic, math and probability".
It's not a pastiche in the typical sense. What author Bruce does is simply use the characters of Watson and Holmes and some very light-hearted mysteries to probe typical ignorance and common misunderstandings about probabilities, statistics, game theory and so on. Bayesian conditional probabilities, the drunkard's walk, probability distributions, the cab driver fallacy, gambling fallacies and other topics of interest in decision theory are touched upon and explained in a fashion that even the most math-phobic reader could hardly fail to understand.
That said, I expect this is the kind of book that would appeal only to that specific niche market I referred to earlier - past readers of the Sherlock Holmes canon who also had an interest in popular mathematics. That interest needn't be deep or at a university level but Conned Again, Watson is unlikely to succeed on the basis of an interest in Sherlock Holmes alone.
Recommended.
Paul Weiss
Talk about niche marketing! Conned Again, Watson is a pretty difficult book to categorize. Perhaps the sub-title does a fair job of letting a potential reader know what it's all about - "cautionary tales of logic, math and probability".
It's not a pastiche in the typical sense. What author Bruce does is simply use the characters of Watson and Holmes and some very light-hearted mysteries to probe typical ignorance and common misunderstandings about probabilities, statistics, game theory and so on. Bayesian conditional probabilities, the drunkard's walk, probability distributions, the cab driver fallacy, gambling fallacies and other topics of interest in decision theory are touched upon and explained in a fashion that even the most math-phobic reader could hardly fail to understand.
That said, I expect this is the kind of book that would appeal only to that specific niche market I referred to earlier - past readers of the Sherlock Holmes canon who also had an interest in popular mathematics. That interest needn't be deep or at a university level but Conned Again, Watson is unlikely to succeed on the basis of an interest in Sherlock Holmes alone.
Recommended.
Paul Weiss
radioactve_piano's review against another edition
3.0
Math! Mystery! Love!
Okay, love has very little to do with it; I just really love math and mystery, so this book, while I already knew all fo the concepts tackled by Bruce, was perfect plane reading for me.
I had never really noticed how sad of a character Watson is, though. But that's neither here nor there.
Okay, love has very little to do with it; I just really love math and mystery, so this book, while I already knew all fo the concepts tackled by Bruce, was perfect plane reading for me.
I had never really noticed how sad of a character Watson is, though. But that's neither here nor there.
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