Ahoy there me mateys!  I enjoy reading about statistics and was intrigued by the concept of how numbers tracking in the era of the smart phones affects life.  I thought I was going to get a more serious look into the science of numbers.  Instead this book was written in a loose style of a self-help book with very little practical advice.  The theme was "numerical vaccination" which the authors themselves don't seem to follow.  I understand they are economics professors but their personal anecdotes seem to fall into all the "traps" they warn against.

There are interesting comments in here, particularly about how numbers influence news articles in both "real" and "fake" news.  However, the book seems to be a doom and gloom look into the numbers game and seems to focus on the fear aspects.  Even when I agreed with the points the authors were making, I still struggled with the point of this book.

Even their own research was lightly touched on and received a couple of paragraphs per study.  I would have preferred a text with actual citations rather than a bibliography.  Why not link to the actual studies?  Or online sources?  Also because I was reading on an e-reader, I couldn't read many of the illustrations and couldn't enlarge them.  The book felt like a gimmick.  I did find some new concepts and data here so I don't regret reading this book.  I was just expecting a lot more.  Arrrr!