What is Scott E. Page reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Scott E. Page, author of The Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You.

His entry begins:

I recently finished reading The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah, which I cannot recommend enough. Appiah decomposes identity through six (partially overlapping) categories: classifications, creed, country, color, class, and culture. I found his description of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as ways that we respond to the natural world. Each of us sees our own way as natural and those of others as unnatural. How we walk, greet, engage. What we wear and eat as well as how we wear clothes and how we eat. These are all habitus. Appiah does such a wonderful job of sharing his erudition, wisdom, and cosmopolitanism without coming across as pompous. Instead, he embodies an enlightened tolerance that we might all emulate. The book is approachable to anyone and a fabulous companion read with the novel In Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman, which also focuses on culture, class, and...[read on]

About The Model Thinker, from the publisher:

How anyone can become a data ninja

From the stock market to genomics laboratories, census figures to marketing email blasts, we are awash with data. But as anyone who has ever opened up a spreadsheet packed with seemingly infinite lines of data knows, numbers aren’t enough: we need to know how to make those numbers talk. In The Model Thinker, social scientist Scott E. Page shows us the mathematical, statistical, and computational models–from linear regression to random walks and far beyond–that can turn anyone into a genius. At the core of the book is Page’s “many-model paradigm,” which shows the reader how to apply multiple models to organize the data, leading to wiser choices, more accurate predictions, and more robust designs. The Model Thinker provides a toolkit for business people, students, scientists, pollsters, and bloggers to make them better, clearer thinkers, able to leverage data and information to their advantage.

Visit Scott E. Page's faculty webpage.

The Page 99 Test: The Model Thinker.

Writers Read: Scott E. Page.

--Marshal Zeringue