Fact: In Israel, pilot trainees who were praised for doing well
subsequently performed worse, while trainees who were shouted at for
doing poorly performed better.Highly intelligent women tend to marry men
who are less intelligent.Students who get the highest scores in third
grade generally get lower scores in fourth grade.Truth: It's wrong to
conclude that shouting is a more effective tool.It's wrong to conclude
that women choose men whose intelligence does not intimidate them.It's
wrong to conclude that schools are failing their students.There's one
reason for each of these truths: a concept called regression to the
mean. It explains how we can be misled by luck in our day-to-day lives.
An insufficient appreciation of luck and chance can wreak all kinds of
mischief in sports, education, medicine, business, politics, and more.
Perfectly natural random variation can lead us to attach meaning to the
meaningless and in What the Luck?, statistician Gary Smith explains how
an understanding of luck can change the way we see just about every
aspect of our lives . . . and can help us learn to rely less on random
chance, and more on truth.