BOOK REVIEW

Department Editor: Jonathan Borak, MD

Books for review should be sent to Jonathan Borak, MD, Clinical Professor of
Epidemiology and Medicine, Yale School of Medicine, 234 Church Street (6th Floor),
New Haven, CT 06510; E-mail: jonathan.borak@yale.edu.

Naked Statistics: Stripping

the Dread From the Data
Charles Wheelan, New York,
NY: W. W. Norton, 2013.
ISBN 978-0-393-07195-5

have often thought of sitting down and

writing a book about statistics for the
nonstatistician; one that would not worry
about formulae, but rather allow the reader
to grasp the ideas that the mathematics capture. I believed that the essential book on
this topic had yet to be published. I pictured
walking the reader through both thought experiments and real-life examples to see the
application of a variety of statistical concepts. In my imagined book, the examples
would be simple enough to follow, yet interesting enough to cause the reader to become anxious to see how they unfolded. I am
somewhat relieved to tell you that Charles
Wheelans book Naked Statistics: Stripping
the Dread From the Data has allowed me to
put away that thought as he has written just
that book.
Naked Statistics does an excellent
job of introducing the topics of statistics
in an orderly manner, often using examples that cause ones initial intuitive ideas
and thoughts to be turned upside down. For
example, sudden infant death syndrome is
marked by the unfortunate and mysterious
death of a seemingly healthy child during its
sleep. Because of the lack of understanding
about the mechanisms of such deaths, their
occurrence often led to suspicions of child
abuse. British prosecutors believed that they
could differentiate between natural deaths
and foul play by focusing their attention
to families that had reported multiple cot
deaths: Since the incidence of cot death
is rare, 1 in 8,500, the chance of having
two cot deaths in the same family would be
(1/8,500) which is roughly 1 in 73 million.
This reeks of foul play.2

That approach seems plausible, until the concept of statistical independence,

or more correctly in this case statistical
dependence, is understood. If there were
some underlying link between those two
sudden infant death syndrome events, for
example, a shared genetic anomaly, then
the two deaths would not be independent
events. To the contrary, suffering one cot
death would substantially increase the likelihood of there being a second one. Unfortunately, many parents were wrongly sent
to prison, convicted by faulty statistical
reasoning.
The book does not limit itself to medical examples; it allows readers to understand the use of statistics throughout our
world and its activities. For example, on
what basis did the Joseph Schlitz Brewing
Company decide that it could risk broadcasting a live taste test of its beer against
a major competitor, Michelob, during halftime of the 1981 Super Bowl? Or, if you
found yourself on Lets Make a Deal, should
you switch your choice of prize doors (there
were three doors and one of them had the
grand prize) after being shown that the prize
was not behind one of the two doors that you
did not choose? Or, how is it that a mutual
fund can use bogus data to claim that three
of their new funds have consistently outperformed the S&P 500? The answers to
all of these questions and more such riddles can be found inside Charles Wheelans
book.
Naked Statistics contains 13 chapters. The first chapter (Whats the Point?)
discusses the reasons that statistics is useful. Chapters 2 and 3 (Descriptive Statistics: Who was the best baseball player of
all time and Deceptive Description: Hes
got a great personality! and other true but
grossly misleading statements) discuss how
the numbers can give us insight into phenomena that we care about, but that allow
bad actors to commit statistical malfeasance
to obscure their nefarious motives. Chapters
5, 5a, and 6 (Basic Probability: Dont buy
the extended warranty on your $99 printer,

The Monty Hall Problem, and Problems

With Probability: How overconfident math
geeks nearly destroyed the global financial
system) focus on studying outcomes that
involve elements of uncertainty. Chapter 8
(The Central Limit Theorem: The Lebron
James of statistics) discusses the engine of
statistics, that is, why it can be used to draw
inferences. Chapters 9 and 10 (Inference:
Why my statistics professor thought I might
have cheated and Polling: How we know
that 64 percent of Americans support the
death penalty (with a sampling error 3
percent) discuss the drawing of meaningful conclusions from observed data. Chapters 11 and 12 (Regression Analysis: The
miracle elixir and Common Regression
Mistakes: The mandatory warning label)
discuss the determination of relationships
between variables that control for other factors. The final chapter (Program Evaluation: Will going to Harvard change your
life?) discusses the use of counterfactuals
in statistical analyses.
In conveying the statistical concepts
included in the book, the author illustrates
his views with a wide variety of well-cited
studies. Thus, motivated and curious readers can dig deeper into the examples and the
statistics they illustrate. Also, to its credit,
the book includes an appendix that contains a short description of four of the more
commonly used statistical software packages along with approximate product prices.
In summary, Charles Wheelan created something rare, a statistical book that
is a pleasurable read, while also revealing
the basic concepts of statistics along with
their strengths and weaknesses. The author
has created a book that will allow people
to better evaluate the inferences drawn by
researchers, pollsters, and others. It should
be considered as essential reading for all
those unfamiliar with statistics, especially
in a world dominated by data.
Martin D. Slade
Yale School of Medicine
New Haven, Conn

C 2014 by American College of OccupaCopyright 

tional and Environmental Medicine
DOI: 10.1097/JOM.0000000000000077

JOEM r Volume 56, Number 1, January 2014

Copyright 2014 Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Unauthorized reproduction of this article is prohibited.

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