Open Thread, 11-22-2012

If you aren't too stuffed, ask! I plan to get my simultaneous review of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't and Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society up over the holiday weekend, but I'm going to be focused on other things besides the blog obviously. That being said, to be frank I don't personally feel that the regular reader of this weblog would get much value from The Signal and the Noise (Nate Silver interviews Robin Hanson. I didn't need to read his book to be aware of Robin Hanson's ideas, he quite freely shares them to all curiosity seekers on the internet and in person). Uncontrolled adds more value in my opinion because experiments in social science are more difficult, and probably more genuinely ground-breaking (if less sexy), than statistical inference.