First chapter was alright, the second two were meh, the 4th even felt a little trite. Smith is not an incompetent writer, but there were times where I was frustrated with the scattered subject matter interspersed with extremely technical descriptions of statistical models. In theory I don't hate this format when it comes to the juxtaposition of history and mathematics/computer science, I just felt like the whole needed a bit more polishing especially for keeping a strong throughline.

Where the book truly picked up my interest again is when Smith dove back into history in chapter 5 to demonstrate how statistics and eugenics are intertwined, and how they are both present in the earliest iterations of big data modelling, with principles that are still in play today. While I am still not loving this book, I am glad I read this chapter.