Nicholas Taleb's Amazon Reviews | Hacker News

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212401

If it's your thing, I highly recommend NNT's YouTube channel [1]. He uploads short videos (that he apparently films with a potato), where he explains stat concepts "for beginners." Of course, he also spends lots of time _roasting_ random researchers/statistics users/noobz.

Actually though, I've actually a bunch of his videos super educational and well made - if you can get past the terrible camera / sound quality.

I watched his explanation of the central limit theorem [2] the other day and found it super helpful. I'm not great at math, but I took multiple stat classes at uni (including two where we went through proofs for the CLT at some level). But this single 10 minute video helped me "get it" more than any class. The big observation that I was missing is that the sample mean is pretty much the same as the sample sum, and the sample sum can sum to "things in the middle" in more ways that things not in the middle (e.g. if you have two dice, rolling a 7 is more likely than rolling a 12).

I'm sure I'm butchering it mostly, but that little bit of intuition was just *nice* - especially after 2 stat classes of rote proof following w/ little to no intuition building.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8uY6yLP9BS4BUc9BSc0Jww

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfM9efdStN8