The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

by Tim Harford

And it turns out that doubt is a really easy product to make.

The experimental subjects found it much easier to argue against positions they disliked than in favor of those they supported. There was a special power in doubt.

All politicians need to do is persuade us to doubt evidence that would challenge those instincts.

Why isn't it also easy to doubt our instincts?

I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.

Sometimes personal experience tells us one thing, the statistics tell us something quite different, and both are true.

Even the year of death, 2017, isn’t as straightforward as you might think. For example, in the UK in 2016, the homicide rate rose sharply. This was because an official inquest finally ruled that ninety-six people who died in a crush at the Hillsborough soccer stadium in 1989 had been unlawfully killed. Initially seen as accidental, those deaths officially became homicides in 2016.

So the problem is not the algorithms, or the big datasets. The problem is a lack of scrutiny, transparency, and debate.

As she grew older, she successfully pleaded with her parents to receive high-quality mathematical tuition; at dinner parties she met the likes of Charles Babbage, a mathematician and designer of a now-famous proto-computer; she was a houseguest of Ada Lovelace, Babbage’s collaborator;

TIL!

Nightingale wrote to her friend the secretary of state for war Sidney Herbert, “Whenever I am infuriated, I revenge myself with a new diagram.”

Nightingale explained to Sidney Herbert that the diagram “is to affect thro’ the Eyes what we may fail to convey to the brains of the public through their word-proof eyes.”

“Making public commitments ‘freezes’ attitudes in place. So saying something dumb makes you a bit dumber. It becomes harder to correct yourself.”

I can think of nothing an audience won’t understand. The only problem is to interest them; once they are interested they understand anything in the world. • Orson Welles1