Michael Shermer
As a lifelong sports fan I’ve always been puzzled by a phenomenon in which a team wins a championship and, after failing to repeat the next season, everyone from fans to management looks for what went wrong and begins trading players and changing strategies, thereby dooming the team to do even worse the season after. Gary
Smith has solved this puzzle, and many more in all walks of life, through the concept of regression to the mean, one of the most powerful and least understood factors in how things turn out in life. You will not look at the world the same after reading this illuminating book.
Alan Reifman
Smith provides a fascinating and accessible overview of regression toward the mean in sports and other domains. If you play fantasy sports, you should go get a copy of this book at once (while hoping your competitors have not done likewise).
Karl J. Meyer
Smith uses a wide variety of real-life examples to illustrate why conventional wisdom often fails to acknowledge that one of the most important ingredients is luck.
Bryan White
Humans are prone to search and ‘find’ causal drivers of the events that shape our lives. In reality, we are impacted by chance more often than we think. Professor
Smith uses simple reasoning and vivid examples to help us decipher truth from fiction, thereby helping us to make better decisions.
Anita Arora
Smith uses entertaining and intuitive examples to show how regression to the mean explains patterns in education, business, and medicine.
Jay Cordes
Regression toward the mean is the key to the universe. Of course, learning about this is both a blessing and a curse. Once people have digested this book, they will absolutely see regression everywhere and understand its effect, but they will also be driven crazy, as you undoubtedly are, when they hear all of the unsupported and sometimes absurd explanations people cling to in order to make sense of it.
Andrew Gelman
Decision makers everywhere should read it to avoid making the mistakes of their predecessors.
Cristian Calude
Vagaries of chance are part of our lives, whether we like it or not. WHAT THE LUCK? presents serious stuff in an eminently readable and entertaining manner. Using colorful examples, it teaches humility for good fortune and hope after misfortune. A
wonderful read!
Jonathan Abelson
The beauty of this book is it sheds light on the need for humility when one experiences good fortune, and the importance of hope after misfortune. This nuanced understanding will help readers make better decisions in all realms of their lives.
Sebastian Thomas
People often underestimate the impact of luck in their lives. What The Luck? is eminently readable and entertaining, filled with colorful examples.”
Tom Gilovich
In clear, entertaining prose and the use of telling, useful, and even charming examples, Smith dissects one of the most fundamental principles of how the world works—and how our intuitions often fail to catch on.Anyone who wants to think more clearly and act more rationally will profit from reading this book.
Cade Massey
Read this book. Then give it to your family and friends. There is no other single idea that will better improve your understanding of the world, and judgment of the future,
than regression-to-the-mean. Drawing on education, health, politics, business,
and sports, Smith shows us how others have gotten it wrong and how you can get it right.
Seattle Book Review
What the Luck?is a valuable arrow of sobering knowledge to keep in your quiver at all times.”
Simeon Nestorov
What The Luck? is a tremendously entertaining and revealing read. A quick and engrossing piece of work, it is a must read for those who approach the world with educated insight! Two thumbs up!”
Woody Studenmund
Gary Smith has another winner! His ability to combine entertaining writing with meaningful analysis should put him at the top of every thinking person's reading list.
Eric Engberg
There is an infectious clarity of statistical reasoning in Gary Smith's work. His friendly,
logical, systematic writing entertains and gives a confidence of membership in an inner circle as brilliant as Smith himself.
Library Journal
08/01/2016
Wales, a country not especially known for its footballing prowess, recently made it to the semifinals of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Championship. However, in the semifinals, they lost to Portugal, ranked eighth. Football analysts and fans alike wrote about how "they simply got tired" and "the weight of expectation became too heavy." Perhaps. Yet according to Smith (economics, Pomona Coll.; Standard Deviation: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways To Lie with Statistics), their failure was more likely owing to "regression to the mean," a statistical explanation of chance. Wales was performing above their ability; regression to the mean dictates that, after a massive game beating the second-best team in the world, Wales returned to performing closer to their skill level. Smith provides examples from almost every aspect of everyday life, from sports and education to business and health, in an accessible and enjoyable exploration of the role of luck in our lives. VERDICT For anyone interested in statistics, fantasy sports players, and those curious about the role of chance.—Tyler Hixson, Library Journal
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-07-31
Another delightful addition to the stuff-you-think-you-know-that’s-wrong genre, á la Freakonomics, Outliers, and The Black Swan.Baseball players who have a good year usually do worse the following year, but bad players often improve. So the good players are slacking off, and the failures are trying harder, right? Wrong. It’s a mathematical law no different from the Pythagorean theorem. Everyone knows why brilliant men marry less-than-brilliant women, but why do brilliant women tend to choose less-intelligent men? Unlike Malcolm Gladwell, Steven Levitt, or Stephen Dubner, all of whom range over many topics, Smith (Economics/Pomona Coll.; Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, 2014, etc.) covers one big concept that almost everyone gets wrong: regression to the mean. Put simply, it means that for any action in which chance plays a role—e.g., taking a test, playing a game, running a business, governing, research—things even out. If you get an extreme result, the next result will probably drift toward the average. A distressing example: medical journals regularly publish studies of effective treatments that, once approved, don’t work as well (mammograms, antidepressants) and sometimes not at all (arthroscopic knee surgery). Eliminating chance from research is difficult. Journals prefer studies that find something. Scientists yearn for a breakthrough, so, if results aren’t impressive, they look again—and again. “If you torture the data long enough,” said British economist and author Ronald Coase, “it will confess.” Smith argues his case with more graphs, studies, examples, and math than necessary, and the end result may leave readers in despair—convinced that almost everyone, experts included, believes an important piece of nonsense and will continue to believe—unless they read this book. A welcome, widely applicable follow-up to the author’s equally useful first book.
