The book that wasn’t

0Ross • 26th Aug 2009 • Learning, Thinking • books, maths, reading

I have just stopped reading The Tiger that Isn’t by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot – and not because I’d completed it. The book is a primer about the use and abuse of numbers in policy-making and in reporting. While it contained some well-chosen quotations and made some fairly good generic points regarding the appropriate use of large and small numbers, it all seemed fairly obvious. I could imagine this being of value to schoolkids getting to grip with evidence usage in decision-making. For everyone else, it’s rather patronising – “depending on what you’re counting, six can be a really big number” [I paraphrase from memory, I haven’t got the book to hand]. The time I would have spent finishing this book off will now be invested in Marcus de Sautoy’s Finding Moonshine.