Correlated: Surprising Connections Between Seemingly Unrelated Things

This was a spectacular waste of money.

I love learning about strange connections and correlated did not disappoint. I wonder what percentage of people who did not recently buy the battle for brazil on amazon would agree???

This is just a bad, bad book. I am a social scientist and one of my specializations is survey research. This book uses worthless, self-selected Internet responses to poorly thought out questions.One of the things that pops into my head with almost every factoid in the book is OMITTED VARIABLE BIAS. This means that some variable other than the two being correlated is affecting the result. For example, "63% have been prescribed a powerful pain killer, but among credit union members, 78% have been prescribed a powerful pain killer." Any question that asks "have you ever..." is tacitly invoking AGE. Older people have had more years and more chances to do whatever "have you ever..." asks about than younger people, in this case take a powerful pain killer. Credit union membership is rarely held by people under 40. So naturally more credit union members have taken powerful pain killers than the average respondent. Part of this bias could have been avoided if the question had been, "In the past 30 days, have you taken a powerful pain killer?" (Of course, older people are STILL more likely than younger people to have taken them in the past 30 days, due to having more and worse ailments. But this would eliminate the bias in many of the authors other "have you ever..." questions.)Other tidbits relate to things that are not "seemingly unrelated" but rather obviously correlated. For example, we learn that people who prefer deep-dish pizza to thin are more likely to prefer creamy salad dressings. Of course, both reflect a preference for greater dairy product. We learn that skiers are better at parallel parking than the average person. Both activities draw on visual-spatial ability.In doing scholarly survey research, we consciously think through these things and figure out how to avoid them. Successful survey research is the art of asking good questions.In addition to being statistically unsound, the book is also poorly written. Every statistic is awkwardly presented in the form, "55% of people prefer product X while 74% of people who engage in activity Y prefer product X." Never does the author vary this tedious style with a ratio or relative percentage or ... anything. Furthermore, many of the statistics are awkwardly given in the negative, e.g., "among those who aren't college graduates, 64% aren't wine drinkers."I would use my red pen if a student of mine wrote even one line of a paper that way.Some of the pages have snippets that seem to be adapted from a guide to descriptive statistics for undergraduates, but the author fails to heed the advice of these pages.Gallup would gravespin; this book isn't even worth being a featured selection from the Bad Sociology Book Club.

Obviously, most statisticians probably won't approve (as the author himself admits), but definitely an entertaining book to have around the house. The book presents a wide variety of interesting correlations, such as the relationship between nail-biting and playing video games and the relationship between introversion and preferring corn off the cob. It's fun to read through the correlations and think about what might be driving these random relationships.Also, the author throws in some interesting mini stats lessons (e.g., "Statistics 101: Correlation and Causation") throughout the book, which are surprisingly accessible yet informative.

Correlated is a very entertaining coffee table book for anyone to pick up and put down as they please. Just as the name describes it's full of seemingly unrelated connections, but I've stumbled across a lot that reflect on how I live my own life.

"We all have that head full of fun useless information, or know someone who does. Gallagher has made sense of that fun useless information and shows how it all relates to one another" - Scott McAllister (Professional Photographer)