Tim Harford's Blog, page 48

Florence Nightingale: the pandemic hero we need

The Florence Nightingale Museum in London, devoted to the pioneering 19th-century nurse, is closing its doors, indefinitely. The museum director, David Green, describes the plan as “hibernation”; the collection will remain on site at St Thomas’s Hospital.

The timing could hardly be more ironic. Last year was Nightingale’s bicentennial. The museum had invested heavily in a new exhibition; it opened in early March, less than a month before the UK’s long first lockdown. Celebratory events across the country had been planned — I was to attend one organised by the Royal Statistical Society — but instead Nightingale was commemorated by the decision to name new emergency hospitals after her.

As the British healthcare system strains to stay upright under the force of the second wave of Covid-19, the Nightingale hospitals are all too appropriately named. Florence Nightingale led a small team of nurses to Istanbul in 1854 to assist in the care of British soldiers fighting in the Crimean war. They were promptly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of casualties, chaotic logistics (“no mops, no plates, no wooden trays”) and shambolic political leadership.

“This is the Kingdom of Hell,” wrote Nightingale.

But while she is most famous as a nurse, Nightingale was also — and I say this in most sincere admiration — a massive geek. She was the first female fellow of what became the Royal Statistical Society, and never happier than when poring over a table of public health statistics. For Nightingale, however, the data were not just a passion but a weapon.

“Whenever I am infuriated,” she wrote to her friend, the influential politician Sidney Herbert, “I revenge myself with a new diagram.”

Nightingale had much to be infuriated about. Returning from the war, she led a long and arduous campaign to improve standards of public health and sanitation. She had a saintly reputation and powerful friends, but was also a woman in a man’s world, facing implacable opposition from the medical and military establishment. In a strange forerunner to last year’s debate about herd immunity, in 1858 John Simon, the chief medical officer, argued that we should simply be taking contagious diseases such as cholera and dysentery on the chin. They were, he declared, “practically speaking, unavoidable”.

No wonder Nightingale spoke of revenge: her diagrams were part of a calculated lobbying campaign to prove that, whatever Simon might say, many deaths from infectious disease in the army, in hospitals and in the community were completely preventable. She told Herbert that she planned to have her diagrams glazed, framed and hung on the wall at the Army Medical Board and the War Department.

Alison Hedley, an expert in 19th-century data visualisation, says that Nightingale’s diagrams — which are still admired today — were particularly striking at the time. Statisticians tended to present data in the form of tables, even if those tables sprawled across page after page.

Nightingale understood that if she was to win an argument, she needed something more eye-catching. (After sending a report to Queen Victoria, Nightingale witheringly commented, “She may look at it because it has pictures.”)

The best-known of Nightingale’s diagrams was published in 1859, a year after Simon’s remarks. Often known as the “rose diagram”, two pale blue spirals tell a powerful two-act story of catastrophic disease in the Crimean war hospitals, followed by recovery after sanitary conditions improved. The diagram is a brilliant visual argument, and it won the day: new public health acts were passed, life expectancy soared and Simon quietly revised his opinions.

There’s a famous remark in a letter that passed between Nightingale and her ally, the great statistician William Farr: “You complain that your report would be dry. The dryer the better. Statistics should be the dryest of all reading.”

Several biographers have reported that remark as being written by Farr to Nightingale, the fusty old statistician reining in the fiery younger campaigner. But while researching my new book, which includes a chapter on Nightingale, I tracked the letter down and realised that the historical record had become confused. The letter wasn’t from Farr to Nightingale. It was the other way round: she was telling him to play it straight.

It’s puzzling: how could Nightingale produce artfully constructed statistical arguments while admonishing William Farr to keep it dry? My guess is that she realised that the more spectacular the statistical rhetoric was, the more unimpeachable the underlying numbers needed to be.

At a time when we are surrounded by visual presentations of life-and-death data, it is a lesson to remember. I can’t help but think of the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, presenting in mid-September a widely scorned “projection” of what might happen if Covid-19 cases doubled every week.

We now know that Vallance’s alarming warnings were prescient. But they were thinly supported by the data available at the time, which left him all too vulnerable to critics looking for flaws in the scientific advice. Nightingale might have warned him, “The dryer the better.”

Nightingale is an icon for our times in another way. Chronically ill after her return from the war, she rarely left her bedroom. She was, nevertheless, an astonishingly productive campaigner. Her symptoms eventually faded after a quarter of a century, and she emerged to the astonishment of many. I hope the Florence Nightingale Museum will not have to hibernate for quite so long. And that the rest of us will escape not in decades, but in weeks.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 13 January 2021.

My new book, “The Data Detective” is published in the US/Canada on 2nd February.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom – have a look and see all my recommendations; Bookshop is set up to support local independent retailers.

Misinformation can be beautiful

Chapter nine of “The Data Detective” / “How To Make The World Add Up” is all about data visualisation – its power, and its pitfalls. The overarching story is about how one woman launched a public health revolution, armed with a fancy pie chart.

I’m fond of the chapter – but how does it look to audiobook listeners? Ah. Obviously the pictures in the audiobook are… well, nonexistent.

So here are links to the graphics in question.

First, Nigel Holmes’s famous – infamous? – graphic, ‘Diamonds were a girl’s best friend‘, produced for Time magazine in 1982 and still debated among dataviz geeks today.

The New Yorker’s ‘subway inequality’ project is interactive and much better viewed on their site.

Andy Cotgreave’s compare-and-contrast exercise with Simon Scarr’s award-winning ‘Iraq’s Blood Toll’ is here as a thumbnail – but go and examine the graphs up close.

Florence Nightingale’s most famous rose diagram – and Hugh Small’s striking replotting of the same data – are best viewed alongside Small’s discussion.

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My new book, “The Data Detective” was published in the US/Canada on 2nd February.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom – have a look and see all my recommendations; Bookshop is set up to support local independent retailers.

A free chapter of The Data Detective audiobook

My book The Data Detective is out today in the US and Canada. (The same book is called How To Make The World Add Up elsewhere in the world.)

To celebrate publication, Riverhead Books have teamed up with Pushkin Industries to release the final chapter of the audiobook on the Cautionary Tales feed.

I’m very proud of the audiobook – please look out for the full version of The Data Detective in audio, print or ebook.

And if you’re here for Cautionary Tales, never fear – the next season starts on February 26th.

Announcing the publication of The Data Detective

Do you want to be able to think more clearly about the world?

Do you want to be able to evaluate the claims that swirl around you in the media and on social media?

Do you wish you knew what questions to ask to sift out the truth from the misinformation?

Are you a curious person, more interested in finding out about the world than in winning some argument on Twitter?

Would you like to come away from reading the news feeling calmer and better informed, rather than stressed and confused?

If the answer to some of those questions is yes, I have good news: it’s publication week for my new book The Data Detective.

This book is the culmination of everything I’ve learned trying to make sense of the numbers in the news and in life – presenting the BBC Radio program ‘More or Less’, writing my Financial Times column, and dealing with my own questions, stresses and mistakes as I go along.

In The Data Detective I offer ten simple rules – not commandments, more habits of mind that I’ve found useful. There is also a FREE bonus GOLDEN RULE. Eleven for the price of ten!

Another thing. The book is full of fun stories. How Florence Nightingale started a public health revolution with a pie chart. How the entire Dutch art world was fooled by their own wishful thinking. How a stripper and a congressman changed the face of US statistics. How the world’s two greatest economists tried, and failed, to see into the future.

Maybe this is why David Epstein mentions the book’s “magnetic storytelling”, Steve Levitt says it is “one of the most wonderful collections of stories that I have read in a long time” and Malcolm Gladwell says, “he’s a genius at telling stories that illuminate our world”.

Of course as a Brit it is embarrassing for me to mention that Maria Konnikova called it “entertaining” and “engrossing” and said the book “awakened my sense of wonder”. Or that the Wall Street Journal says it “expertly guides us through the many ways in which data can trick us”. Or that the Financial Times said it was “wise and useful – such a delight”.

But I’m trying to persuade you to buy a copy so I’m going to power through the awkwardness.

If you are reading this and thinking, “but Tim, I recently bought and enjoyed your book How To Make The World Add Up, and this book sounds so similarly excellent I could almost believe they are the same book”… well, THEY ARE THE SAME BOOK.

The Data Detective is the US & Canadian edition of How To Make The World Add Up. I know it is confusing. Sorry.

If you have read and enjoyed How To Make The World Add Up and have a friend in North America PLEASE TELL THEM about The Data Detective. Thank you.

I loved writing this book and I am proud of it. I was astonished when it became a Christmas number one, hitting the top of the Sunday Times business bestseller lists.

I’m also proud of the audiobook. All my previous audiobooks have been read by excellent actors but this time I wanted to do the job myself. It felt important. I’m glad I did.

You can order the book from Amazon, from Bookshop, from a number of other sources here, or of course from your local independent bookshop.

And please spread the word!

What can we learn from the great working-from-home experiment?

In February 2014, London’s Underground was partially shut down by a strike that forced many commuters to find new ways to get to work. The disruption lasted just 48 hours, but when three economists (Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch and Tim Willems) studied data from the city’s transport network, they discovered something interesting.

Tens of thousands of commuters did not return to their original routes, presumably having found faster or more pleasant ways to reach their destination. A few hours of disruption were enough to make them realise that they had been doing commuting wrong their entire adult lives.

I mention this because we are at a turning point in the pandemic. Many people, myself included, have largely been working from home. For months it has been hard to shake the feeling that this will last for ever. Now we are contemplating a vaccine-fuelled return to normality — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.

What the 2014 Tube strike teaches us is that temporary disruptions can have permanent effects. Sometimes there are scars that do not heal; sometimes a crisis teaches us lessons we can use when it has passed. So what have we learnt from the remote-working experiment? And to what extent will it continue after the virus has retreated?

One obvious point is that, like a strike-delayed commuter who invests in a new bike, both workers and employers have sunk considerable time and effort into acquiring the equipment and skills necessary to support the change. Such investments will make working from home cheaper and more tempting in future.

I suspect, however, that the crucial step is not investment but information. We have learnt that working from home is more productive than we had guessed.

Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel, two young economists at Harvard University, found that before the pandemic remote workers at one large company had been less productive than office-based workers. Yet when everyone switched to remote work, overall productivity increased. The explanation of the apparent contradiction is that working from home is intrinsically more productive, but this truth was obscured by the fact that fewer productive workers were attracted to working from home. Now that employers have discovered the apparent productivity penalty is illusory, perhaps remote work will be far more popular in future.

Similarly, a famous study of remote work by Nicholas Bloom and colleagues analysed a randomised experiment at Ctrip, a large Chinese travel agency, in which some staff were assigned to work from home. The expectation was that productivity would fall but the costs of providing office space would fall too. Instead, Bloom and colleagues found that workers became sharply more productive at home.

All this suggests that the pandemic, like the Tube strike, will be the jolt that pushes us into doing the remote working we should have been doing all along. But I am not so sure.

One point that is easily overlooked is that, in both these studies, the workers in question were moving from taking calls in a call centre to taking calls at home. In Bloom’s research, the home workers and office workers used the same equipment and order-flow software, did the same tasks and were rewarded with the same bonuses.

This should also be a warning not to draw conclusions that are too broad. In a well-run call centre, the protocols for assigning, monitoring and closing out tasks are well established. They do not require a chain of group emails to figure out what is happening or to schedule a Zoom call. The same is not true of much knowledge work.

As Cal Newport, author of the forthcoming A World Without Email, pointed out in the New Yorker last May: “The knowledge work pursued in many modern offices — thinking, investigating, synthesizing, writing, planning, organizing, and so on — tends to be fuzzy and disorganized compared to the structured processes of, say, industrial manufacturing.”

Newport’s view is that this is a solvable problem, but most offices simply haven’t got their act together. Sitting in an open-plan office allows a team to muddle through without realising quite how much time they waste on busywork and co-ordination.

A few knowledge jobs, such as IT support, are properly systematised to allow focused work without endless ad hoc emails. Newport believes that others will follow once we all wise up. Or we may find that certain kinds of knowledge work are too unruly to systematise. Improvisation will remain the only mode of working — and, for that, face-to-face contact seems essential.

A recent survey by Bloom, with Jose Maria Barrero and Steven Davis, estimates that remote work in the US will become more than four times as common after the pandemic, increasing from 5 per cent to 22 per cent of work days. That would be a big swing back towards normality — the researchers estimate that in May 2020 more than 60 per cent of paid workers in the US were operating from home. But it would still be a seismic fall in demand for commuting and city-centre office space.

I hope that the crisis teaches us how to do productive and fulfilling work from home. But it seems that most of us, most of the time, are destined to return to the office in due course. If so, I hope the crisis teaches us how to do productive and fulfilling work wherever we may be.

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Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 31 December 2020.

My new book, “The Data Detective” is published in the US/Canada on 2nd February. “Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.” – Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom – have a look and see all my recommendations; Bookshop is set up to support local independent retailers.

Adam Grant on Thinking Again

I’m delighted to be sharing a publication day, 2 February, with Adam Grant and his new book, Think Again.

Well, mostly delighted: that’s one fewer slot on the bestseller lists for me to aim for. Think Again is a stone cold classic and destined to do extremely well.

The book explores three key areas: individual rethinking (the challenges and benefits of being willing to reconsider your views); interpersonal rethinking (how do you get other people to think again?); and collective rethinking (can we shape a culture of respectful and engaged debate?).

It’s full of vignettes – I loved the descriptions of ‘the Difficult Conversations lab’, the robot debater, and the Icelandic presidential election – and it also performs the difficult task of describing complex research in a way that makes the research feel relevant, and the reader feel smart.

Adam Grant makes writing seem effortless; he’s funny and charming, he tells you what you need to know without getting lost in the detail.

There is some common ground between Think Again and my own book, The Data Detective. Think Again is a book about the science and psychology of changing your mind and the minds of others; The Data Detective is a book about clear thinking, armed with the tool of statistics.

My opening and final chapters, in particular, discuss the challenges of rigid preconceptions and the power of open-minded curiosity; there are some enjoyable resonances between the two books.

One difference, however, is that Adam spends considerable time and energy on the problem of persuasion – how to help other people change their minds.

I had all but given up on persuasion: I’m just happy if I can think straight myself, let alone talk sense into anyone else.

But Adam has encouraged me to think again about that. His chapters on debating and on ‘motivational interviewing’ were fantastic.

How does a ‘vaccine whisperer’ persuade severely hesitant parents to vaccinate their children? By listening to their concerns, and not actively trying to change their minds. Fascinating and moving.

I also found the complementarities between the books enjoyable. It’s always great fun to read someone you respect wrestling with similar issues – for example, the relationship between expertise and clear thinking.

This is such an important idea to me that I began my book with it. My opening chapter discusses the strange case of Abraham Bredius, perhaps the world’s leading expert on Johannes Vermeer.

Bredius was cruelly tricked by what now seems to be a crude forgery. Why? Because he wanted so desperately to believe that his expertise became a liability. He was able to persuade himself with scraps of evidence that you or I wouldn’t have noticed in a hundred years of study.

Adam discusses some of the same psychological research – and reassuringly, he finds and discusses other studies that point to similar conclusions. He writes, “the better you are at crunching numbers, the more spectacularly you fail at analysing patterns that contradict your views”.

Exactly. It’s not that expertise is a liability – far from it. It’s that if you start in a hole of ideology or partisan argument or simple wishful thinking, your expertise will NOT dig you out. First, calm down and wise up about your preconceptions. Only then start to apply your expertise.

I loved reading this book, learned a lot, and strongly recommend it.

I am interviewing Adam about Think Again at the How To Academy on Friday evening, 19 February.

Adam Grant – The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

My new book, “The Data Detective” is published in the US/Canada on 2nd February.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom – have a look and see all my recommendations; Bookshop is set up to support local independent retailers.

Is ‘first dose first’ the right vaccination strategy?

What a difference a couple of weeks makes. In mid-December, I asked a collection of wise guests on my BBC radio programme How to Vaccinate the World about the importance of second doses. At that stage, Scott Gottlieb, former head of the US Food and Drug Administration, had warned against stockpiling doses just to be sure that second doses were certain to be available, Economists such as Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University had gone further: what if we gave people single doses of a vaccine instead of the recommended pair of doses, and thus reached twice as many people in the short term? This radical concept was roundly rejected by my panel

The concept was roundly rejected. “This is an easy one, Tim, because we’ve got to go with the scientific evidence,” said Nick Jackson of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations. “And the scientific evidence is that two doses is going to provide the best protection.”

My other guests agreed, and no wonder: Jackson’s view was firmly in the scientific mainstream three weeks ago. But in the face of a shortage of doses and a rapidly spreading strain of “Super-Covid”, the scientific mainstream appears to have drifted. The UK’s new policy is to prioritise the first dose and to deliver the second one within three months rather than three weeks. Cynics argue that this change is a wearingly familiar display of dishonesty and short-termism, designed to produce flattering figures about the number of people vaccinated. Yet the recommendation comes not from ministers but from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI).

Strikingly, many scientists have given the move their approval. Others remain sceptical and are alarmed both by the shift in policy and by the way it was announced. There are several different issues to untangle here.

The first is the short-term benefit of the shift to what we might call “first dose first”. That depends on how good a single dose is in the short term (pretty good in the case of the first vaccine from BioNTech/Pfizer), whether it will still be good enough for the elderly people at the front of the queue (we don’t know) and whether a delay will ruin the booster effect of the second dose (we don’t know that, either; it might even help).

Cars are better with two headlights, and bicycles are better with two wheels. But while a bicycle with one wheel is useless, a car with only one headlight might be good enough in a pinch. The judgment here is that a single dose is more like a car with a single headlight than a bike with a single wheel. Given that these vaccines probably prevent the spread of the virus as well as preventing disease, it is possible that even people at the head of the queue might benefit if their second dose was temporarily redirected: if forced to drive in the dark, I would rather that every car on the road had one headlight than some two and some none. With a dangerous virus in wide circulation, we are all driving in the dark.

But the shift to “first dose first” creates other dangers. One is vaccine resistance. Half-vaccinated people encourage vaccine-resistant strains of the virus. Some scientists think this is a modest risk compared to the selection pressure from millions of people who have already developed some immunity after infection. Others think it is a catastrophe waiting to happen.

A further problem is public trust. The UK’s move smacks of desperation, and the detail behind the JCVI’s recommendation has not been published. People have been vaccinated with the promise of a second dose, only to be told the second dose will be delayed; some will feel betrayed.

My own instinct has long been that the “first dose first” strategy was worth a try. But I have never believed that “Tim Harford’s instinct” is a sound basis for life-or-death public-health decisions. So, having made this leap, the government now needs to step up its communication and its gathering of evidence.

Nicole Basta, an epidemiologist at McGill University, points out that while clinical trials study the protective benefit to an individual of a vaccine, they don’t study vaccination strategies. There is nothing wrong with making our best guess. But the government needs to be honest about the uncertainties Those studies are now urgently needed.

The University of Dundee is planning to launch a study called VAC4COVID, focusing on safety and side effects. The ZOE COVID Symptom Study app provides another window into the experiences of people who have been vaccinated. But we need much more.

We need rigorously randomised trials comparing different doses, delays between doses, and mixed-dose vaccinations too. We can also learn a lot simply by studying what happens to different people who have received different vaccination regimes. What we learn would allow the fine-tuning of mass vaccination months and years into the future.

Some of these studies will happen but I worry that many will not. Danny Altmann of Imperial College laments the lack of a large-scale monitoring effort — there seems to be no plan even for something as simple as calling people back to test their blood for antibody levels after vaccination.

In any case, solid evidence will take time to assemble. Meanwhile, there is nothing wrong with making our best guess. But the government needs to be honest with the doctors and the public about where the uncertainties lie. It needs to support rapid collection of new evidence to reduce those uncertainties. And it would be wonderful if it could shake the appearance of making things up as it goes along.

Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the choice is easy or the evidence is clear. “First dose first” is a gamble. So are all the alternatives.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 8 January 2021.

My new book, “The Data Detective” is published in the US/Canada on 2nd February.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom – have a look and see all my recommendations; Bookshop is set up to support local independent retailers.

The best podcasts about Covid vaccines

While working on How To Vaccinate The World, a weekly podcast devoted to Covid vaccination, I’ve been a voracious consumer of other podcasts about vaccination and the vaccination race. Here are a few recommendations – feel free to email me if you have other suggestions.

Vaccines, Money and Politics – a formidably intelligent BBC two-parter written and presented by the formidably intelligent producer of How to Vaccinate the World, Sandra Kanthal. A terrific introduction to all the issues.

Moncef Slaoui was interviewed by Steve ‘Freakonomics’ Levitt on the People I Mostly Admire podcast. It’s an excellent interview, full of insights. (Although i thought Slaoui didn’t properly engage with the question about challenge trials.)

Freakonomics also asked, early on in the pandemic, whether a Covid-19 vaccine would change the future of medical research.

Planet Money examined the economics of emergency vaccination.

Conversations with Tyler put the usual dizzying range of questions to Noubar Afeyan, the founder of Moderna. Tyler’s breadth means there’s a lot more going on here than vaccine talk, but that’s all to the good.

Nature’s ‘Coronapod‘ podcast – sometimes stand-alone, sometimes folded into NaturePod – doesn’t always talk about vaccines, but it’s a good source for rigorous journalism.

The New York Times looked at the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

Slightly different, but you might enjoy ‘How To End a Pandemic‘ – my sideways look at the history of smallpox variolation.

My new book, “The Data Detective” is published in the US/Canada on 2nd February.

“Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.”- Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom – have a look and see all my recommendations; Bookshop is set up to support local independent retailers.

What puzzles and poker teach us about misinformation

Here’s a holiday quiz question for you: what do puzzles, poker, and misinformation have in common? The answer is at the bottom of this column.

Let’s try an easier question first. In Santa’s workshop, if it takes five elves five minutes to wrap five presents, how long does it take 50 elves to wrap 50 presents? You probably know the answer to that one; it follows a classic formula for a trick question. But as you groped towards the correct answer you may have had to fight off your instinct to blurt out a tempting wrong answer: 50 minutes.

The arithmetic is no challenge for an astute FT reader; the difficulty with this problem is pausing for the brief moment necessary to carry that arithmetic out, while fending off the obvious but incorrect answer that pops into your mind unbidden.

An even more famous example is the “bat and ball” question: if a bat and a ball together cost $1.10, and the bat costs a dollar more than the ball, how much does the ball cost? Ten cents, screams the instinctive response, but it does not require a spreadsheet to work out that that is not right. It just requires one to stop and think (or to have heard the question before).

And here’s a less famous one: if you flip a coin three times, what is the probability of flipping at least two heads? A naive response is that two out of three flips need to come good, and the chance of that is one-third. A more sophisticated response recognises that three coin flips produce eight possible combinations — so perhaps the probability is three out of eight? Work through those eight combinations, however, and you realise that the true chance is 50-50.

Questions such as these are called cognitive reflection problems. They were made famous by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, but they were developed by the behavioural economist Shane Frederick. They vary in difficulty, but the ideal cognitive reflection problem has an answer that is simple, obvious, and wrong — as well as a correct answer that is not too hard to calculate.

The behavioural scientists Gordon Pennycook and David Rand, sometimes working with other colleagues, have published studies drawing the connection between cognitive reflection problems and online misinformation. Often people see false claims and share them impulsively, not because they cannot figure out that the claims are false, but because they didn’t stop long enough to try. Spotting fake news, like realising the ball costs just five cents and the 50 elves wrap 50 presents in just five minutes, requires us to stop and think for a moment. And who has time for that these days?

Pennycook and Rand have found that people who score higher on Shane Frederick’s cognitive reflection test also do better at distinguishing truth from politically partisan falsehood. They also conducted a survey which found that most people were perfectly able to distinguish serious journalism from fake news. When they amplified absurd headlines such as “Over 500 ‘Migrant Caravaners’ Arrested With Suicide Vests”, they did so not because they wanted to spread misinformation, nor because they themselves were unable to detect lies, but because in a world full of distractions they hadn’t really stopped to think.

Let’s move from puzzles to poker. To the uninitiated, poker is a game involving three elements: luck, calculation and deception. But professional poker players have told me that a fourth element is just as important: controlling your emotions, or more often, failing to do so — in the lingo, “going on tilt”. In her spellbinding foray into professional poker, The Biggest Bluff, the psychologist Maria Konnikova describes “tilt” as “letting emotions — incidental ones that aren’t actually integral to your decision process — affect decision making.”

This may mean blind rage, as in the tale of the gambler so incandescent that he rammed a billiard ball into his mouth then realised he could not remove it. But as Konnikova points out, it may also be a positive emotion such as taking a liking to a fellow player, or feeling joy at winning a hand.

We cannot escape our emotions, but clear decision-making requires that we notice them and take them into account. And just as a poker player can go on tilt, so can any of us as we read the headlines or scroll through social media. Indeed, we should expect those headlines to be “tilting”: headline writers aim for impact, while social media thrives on emotional engagement from joy to fury.

“The goal,” writes Konnikova, “is to learn to identify our emotions, analyse their cause, and if they’re not actually part of our rational decision process . . . dismiss them as sources of information.” Good advice for poker players. But good advice for anyone doomscrolling through Twitter or shouting at the radio during the morning news bulletin.

My advice is simply to take note of your emotional reaction to each headline, sound bite or statistical claim. Is it joy, rage, triumph? Fine. But having noticed it, keep thinking. You may find clarity emerges once your emotions have been acknowledged.

So what do puzzles, poker, and misinformation have in common? Some puzzles — and some poker hands — require enormous intellectual resources to navigate, and the same is true of certain subtle statistical fallacies. But much of the time we fool ourselves in simple ways and for simple reasons. Slow down, calm down, and the battle for truth is already half won.

Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 4 December 2020.

My new book, “The Data Detective” is published in the US/Canada on 2nd February. “Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.” – Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom – have a look and see all my recommendations; Bookshop is set up to support local independent retailers.

In praise of the humble products all around us

Tom Kelley is a sensitive soul. Shortly after sending the manuscript of his first book, The Art of Innovation, to his publisher, he visited Kepler’s, his local bookshop in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley. “I literally started to cry,” he confessed to a group of authors to which I belong, “thinking about all the effort and all the sacrifices authors had made to get those thousands of books on to the stage.”

I see you, Tom. I vividly remember my excitement the first time I saw one of my books in the wild, in Kramerbooks, in Washington DC. Eight books later, I can attest that writing and publishing one is still as exciting — and still as exhausting. Thinking of all my fellow authors going through the same thing is rather moving; that bookshops keep being shut down by the pandemic simply adds to the pathos.

But books are not the only products that should make us pause in awe and gratitude. What about the humble pencil? In a famous 1958 essay, “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E Read”, Read’s pencil-narrator acknowledges that it is easily overlooked.

“Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye — there’s some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.”

Read’s pencil is a proselytising free-market fan and explains that it has an impressive pedigree: its graphite is from Ceylon, mixed with Mississippi clay, sulphuric acid and animal fats. Its cedar wood grew naturally but harvesting the timber required saws, axes, motors, rope and a railway car.

The pencil — if you let it — will talk your ears off on the subject of its six coats of lacquer, or the origin of the brass in its ferrule, or the eraser on its tip. (Shockingly, the pencil even reveals how the graphite gets into the middle of the wood. I will not spoil that for you; econo-magicians must keep their secrets.)

These products are produced by people we never meet, at a price so low — relative to our wages — that our ancestors would be staggered A modern variation on the pencil’s family tree comes courtesy of Thomas Thwaites, an artist and designer whose “Toaster Project” was an attempt to design and build an ordinary toaster, beginning with assembling his own raw materials — quarrying mica, refining plastic, smelting steel.

“You could easily spend your life making a toaster,” he told me when I interviewed him about the project more than a decade ago. And indeed he took various short-cuts. Nevertheless, his finished toaster cost about £1,000 and required several months of work. It looked like a cake iced by a three-year-old, and when plugged into the mains it immediately caught fire.

A budget shop-bought toaster does not catch fire and costs less than a hardback book. It is unlikely to move anyone to tears, yet the people who mine metals, refine plastics, generate our electricity and design safe electrical appliances no doubt work at least as hard as any author. The results are so cheap and reliable we overlook them. Indeed, we are surrounded by products we barely understand, produced by people we never meet, often at a quality so high and a price so low — relative to our wages — that our ancestors would be staggered.

No one person has a complete view of the production process or co-ordinates it from the moment the cedar tree sprouts to the moment the barcode on the box of pencils is scanned at the checkout.

“No one sitting in a central office gave orders,” explained Milton Friedman, the free-market evangelist and Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist who helped make Read’s pencil essay famous. The laissez-faire implications of all this decentralised complexity were obvious to Friedman, and the pencil itself put it best: “Leave all creative energies uninhibited . . . Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand.”

I have sympathy with that conclusion but it does not follow as a matter of logic. The pencil’s family tree includes government-granted patents, government-owned railways and a large industrial conglomerate. Orders from central offices are definitely given.

And a left-winger might instead be prompted by the pencil’s story to lament our alienation from the objects that surround us. We read books, make toast, sketch with pencils and yet we have no real idea how, where or by whom even these simple objects were made — let alone about every stage of something more complex such as a car, a computer or an mRNA vaccine. Simple, local, handcrafted products have an undeniable emotional appeal, though life would not necessarily be better if we all had to whittle our own pencils.

Leaving to one side the debate over economic ideology, I applaud Kelley’s appreciation of the effort and creativity, often from people unknown, that went into the products that surrounded him.

AJ Jacobs, in his book Thanks a Thousand, gracefully underscored this point. He decided to thank, in person or on the phone, everyone involved in making his morning coffee, from the barista to the pest-control expert at the warehouse, the lid designer to the workers at the reservoir that supplied the water — about a thousand people in all.

At a time when the pandemic has caused some very visible wounds to workers we see every day, it has been astonishing how many people have been able to keep working productively. Books are still being published; pencils are still being made; I bought a new toaster just a few weeks ago. Tears or no tears, I am trying to notice the contribution both of those who are no longer able to work and of those who are.

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Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 11 December 2020.

My new book, “The Data Detective” is published in the US/Canada on 2nd February. “Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford.” – Bill Bryson

“This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic and genuine curiosity”- Maria Konnikova

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