Tag: statistics

When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress – Gabor Maté

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When we have been prevented from learning how to say no, our bodies may end up saying it for us.

While it is common knowledge that stress is affecting one’s health, Dr Gabor Mate takes it a step further and analyses the impact of stress on body by looking into a patient’s childhood, relationship with partners, work and life in general.

The book is bold in its suggestion that body is over mind, considering that a person cannot accumulate stress and tension without effect. Dr Mate goes as far as saying that there is a “cancer” profile, where physicians can increase the chances of confirming cancer by looking at a patient’s personality. The ones who always try to help others, cannot say no to demands and are always smiling, those people simply bottle up negative emotions that would surface as an autoimmune disease.

An interest concept put forward by the author is the difference between rage and anger. He promotes the idea that it is ok to be angry and let tension exit the body. An angry person relaxes its body, takes a long breath and lets tension out. This comes in contrast with rage, which is uncontrolled violence (physical, verbal, behavioural). A person in a rage has all muscles contracted, does not breath correctly and accumulates tension.

The cost of hidden stress

The book is full of various medical cases and draws heavily on medical research, making it a somewhat dry reading. Nevertheless, this does not draw from the appeal of understand how our choices are affecting us.

It finishes with Seven A’s of Healing: principles of healing and the prevention of illness from hidden stress:

    • Acceptance – accepting us how we are
    • Awareness – of our bodies and what they are telling us
    • Anger – in Dr. Mate’s view, anger has cognitive value and works as a way to release tension and negative emotions
    • Autonomy – independent thoughts and actions
    • Attachment – being connected with others is healing
    • Assertion – speak up for ourselves
    • Affirmation – affirming our creating selves, and also our connection to something bigger.

    The book is really wonderful and warmly recommend to read, whenever we feel that life takes over us.

    Factfulness – Hans Rosling

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    This is data as you have never known it: it is data as therapy. It is understanding as a source of mental peace. Because the world is not as dramatic as it seems. Factfulness, like a healthy diet and regular exercise, can and should become part of your daily life. Start to practice it, and you will be able to replace your overdramatic worldview with a worldview based on facts. You will be able to get the world right without learning it by heart. You will make better decisions, stay alert to real dangers and possibilities, and avoid being constantly stressed about the wrong things.

    The central idea of the book is that world is much better than you think and it is getting better. Hans Rosling presents with data how world improved over time and shows with surveys how pessimistic without cause the reader is. While not perfect, the world is indeed getting better and the author presents the pessimistic biases we have.

    The book is structured in 10 chapters, presenting an instinct that we must be aware from:

    1. The Gap Instinct
    2. The Negativity Instinct
    3. The Straight Line Instinct Exercise: Question Your Assumptions
    4. The Fear Instinct
    5. The Size Instinct
    6. The Generalization Instinct Exercise: Getting the Full Picture
    7. The Destiny Instinct
    8. The Single Perspective Instinct
    9. The Blame Instinct
    10. The Urgency Instinct

    The book was written in the last months of life of Doctor Hans Rosling and seems to encompass his last message to the world: that we should leave bias and look for data, which will help us to create a better world and be more successful in medicine, business and development.

    The book is thoroughly entertaining, full of imagines and survey questions that make the read a pleasure. It challenges the reader to rethink the world around. What is really the masterstroke is presenting data in a way that is easy to understand and delivers a clear message.

    One of the most thought-provoking, well-written books on the world and developing trends currently on the shelves.

    The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today – Linda Yueh

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    Joan Robinson points out that if markets are imperfectly competitive, then firms can earn economic rents because rents aren’t entirely eroded by competition. In that situation, firms have market power…a theory of ‘monopsony’ [refers] to the market power that firms can wield in the labour market alongside the more familiar and established term, monopoly power, where firms have market power in the product market and can charge more for a good or service above their costs, earning them monopoly profits. Monopsony power allows employers to pay workers less than the value of their output, and keep more for themselves.

    The book presents a selection of 12 illustrious economists, from the modern era to contemporary times. Linda Yueh introduces the reader to the ideas, times and life of those economists, but also speculates how one such economist would answer to the hot questions of today, from his/her perspective.

    The Great Economists includes:
    Adam Smith
    David Ricardo
    Karl Marx
    Alfred Marshall
    Irving Fisher
    John Maynard Keynes
    Joseph Schumpeter
    Friedrich Hayek
    Joan Robinson
    Milton Friedman
    Douglass North
    Robert Solow

    Linda Yueh is actually an economist, a fellow of the University of Oxford and assistant professor at the London Business School. A formal lawyer and journalists, she tries to present the groundbreaking ideas of those 12 economists in simple, non-academic terms. On that front, Yueh marvelously encapsulates the times and concepts put forward by those famous economists in the last three centuries.

    The book is structured in 12 main chapters, each presented an economist. Each chapter is further divided into an introduction to the economist’s ideas, a presentation of his/her times, a study of today’s societies, with no focus on a particular country, and finally, a subsection where the economists’ ideas are tested to see how they can help us for today’s problems.

    The book is truly enjoyable, particularly for a reader accustomed with the domain. It is a great reminder of important economic ideas. It is an interesting read for someone outside the domain as well, as it acts as a textbook, including a dictionary of terms at the end. I particularly liked the short biography for each economist and the brief presentation of the times they lived, bringing many insights into the motivations for their research.

    Maybe exploring more the answers that such economists could have given to today’s questions would make the book even more interesting. I would have been delighted to see more economists added into the book, as each was carefully presented through the lens of their time and with a well-written, thoughtful and clear introduction of their ideas.

    Overall, a great book to read that has a deserved place on my bookshelf.

    How to Lie with Statistics – Darrell Huff

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    Extrapolations are useful, particularly in that form of soothsaying called forecasting trends. But in looking at the figures or charts made from them, it is necessary to remember one thing constantly: The trend-to-now may be a fact, but the future trend represents no more than an educated guess. Implicit in it is “everything else being equal” and “present trends continuing.” And somehow everything else refuses to remain equal, else life would be dull indeed.

    The book gives straightforward examples of how statistics may be used to deceive. Although written in 1954, it is actual and relevant. The writing is fluid and can be simply understood even from some who is not astute in mathematics.

    Manual for critical thinking.

    Each chapter presents a particular twist of facts through statistics, usually taking an example from a journal or an advert. Because it is assumed that people give more credibility to facts presented through figures (the more precise, the better), those figures are used to mislead and misinterpret what is really happening.

    To mention just a few twists: sample biases (for example a conservative magazine asking readers who they think will win the presidency); inadequate sampling (only 3 or 9 cases); difference between mean and median (the block of apartments might have a different average salary if a very rich man moves in; this doesn’t mean you are richer, but the average goes up); statistical differences lower than than the statistical error presented as relevant differences (such as IQ tests); graphs with no axis measurements; small differences made great through graph manipulations; infographic manipulations (when the difference is, let’s say x2, but the two objects compared in the infographic have surfaces presented at square (x4)); semi-attached figures (when you prove a fact and associate a second one to the first, letting the second fact subtly draw its veracity from the proof of the first); difference between forecast and extrapolation; and many others.

    Overall, this little book from Darell Huff is a great defense technique manual for a critical thinker and it is a particular good recommendation for honest journalists, wanting to get the facts from press releases.