Mark Prell’s ‘What are the Odds?’ illustrates the pitfalls of assuming certainty

Deciding how fast to drive, brewing better beer, and winning bar bets — Mark Prell, a respected statistician, offers a modern guide to probabilistic thinking in What are the Odds?: A Statistical Guide to Certainty in an Uncertain World. Following in the footsteps of Darrell Huff’s 1954 classic, How to Lie with Statistics, Prell underscores that probabilistic literacy is essential for everyone, not just mathematicians, to navigate a world rife with complexity and ambiguity.

Many books have addressed uncertainty. Charles Wheelan’s Naked Statistics, from 2013, and Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West’s Calling Bulls***, from 2020, echo Huff’s witty exposé of data misuse. Daniel Kahneman examines cognitive biases in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) and Noise (2021). And works such as Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise (2012) and Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction (2016) explore the dangers of overconfidence in predictive models. Prell’s approach