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

by Tim Harford

This book has argued that it is possible to gather and to analyze numbers in ways that help us understand the world. But it has also argued that very often we make mistakes not because the data aren’t available, but because we refuse to accept what they are telling us.

Be curious. Look deeper and ask questions.

The philosopher Onora O’Neill once declared, “Well-placed trust grows out of active inquiry rather than blind acceptance.”

If we want to be able to trust the world around us, we need to show an interest and ask a few basic questions.

those questions aren’t obscure or overly technical; they are what any thoughtful, curious person would be happy to ask.

the way our political and cultural identity—our desire to belong to a community of like-minded, right-thinking people—can, on certain hot-button issues, lead us to reach the conclusions we wish to reach. Depressingly, not only do we reach politically comfortable conclusions when parsing complex statistical claims on issues such as climate change, we reach politically comfortable conclusions regardless of the evidence of our own eyes.

Curiosity breaks the relentless pattern.

the more curious we are, the less our tribalism seems to matter.

one of our stubborn defenses against changing our minds is that we’re good at filtering out or dismissing unwelcome information. A curious person, however, enjoys being surprised and hungers for the unexpected. He or she will not be filtering out surprising news, because it’s far too intriguing.

A surprising statistical claim is a challenge to our existing worldview. It may provoke an emotional response—even a fearful one.

One thing that provokes curiosity is the sense of a gap in our knowledge that needs to be filled.

As Loewenstein puts it, curiosity starts to glow when there’s a gap “between what we know and what we want to know.”

There’s a sweet spot for curiosity: if we know nothing, we ask no questions; if we know everything, we ask no questions either. Curiosity is fueled once we know enough to know that we do not know.

The illusion of explanatory depth is a curiosity killer and a trap. If we think we already understand, why go deeper? Why ask questions?

It’s a rather beautiful discovery: in a world where so many people seem to hold extreme views with strident certainty, you can deflate somebody’s overconfidence and moderate their politics simply by asking them to explain the details.

As Orson Welles said, once people are interested they can understand anything in the world.

Facts are valuable things, and so is fact-checking. But if we really want people to understand complex issues, we need to engage their curiosity. If people are curious, they will learn.

If we economists want people to understand economics, we must first engage their interest.

once we start to peer beneath the surface of things, become aware of the gaps in our knowledge, and treat each question as the path to a better question, we find that curiosity is habit-forming.