How to Make the World Add Up Quotes

“The Target algorithm hadn’t produced a superhuman leap of logic, but a very human one: it figured out exactly what you or I or anyone else would also have figured out, given the same information.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“But the change in tone also reflects a change in the zeitgeist between 2013 and 2016. In 2013, the relatively few people who were paying attention to big data often imagined themselves to be the carpenters; by 2016, many of us had realized that we were nails.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“There are some overtly racist and sexist people out there—look around—but in general what we count and what we fail to count is often the result of an unexamined choice, of subtle biases and hidden assumptions that we haven’t realized are leading us astray.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“The United Nations, for example, has embraced a series of ambitious “Sustainable Development Goals” for 2030. But development experts are starting to call attention to a problem: we often don’t have the data we would need to figure out whether those goals have been met.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Testing a hypothesis using the numbers that helped form the hypothesis in the first place is not OK.15”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“For obvious reasons, this particular flavor of survivorship bias is called “publication bias.” Interesting findings are published; non-findings, or failures to replicate previous findings, face a higher publication hurdle.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, puts it succinctly: “To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week’s newspapers.”27”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“But the psychologist Steven Pinker has argued that good news tends to unfold slowly, while bad news is often more sudden.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“The shortest-lived creatures on the Disc were mayflies, which barely make it through twenty-four hours. Two of the oldest zigzagged aimlessly over the waters of a trout stream, discussing history with some younger members of the evening hatching. “You don’t get the kind of sun now that you used to get,” said one of them. “You’re right there. We had proper sun in the good old hours. It were all yellow. None of this red stuff.” “It were higher, too.” “It was. You’re right.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Net wealth is a great way to measure riches, but not such a good way to measure poverty. Lots of people have zero, or less than zero. Some of them are destitute; others, like the junior doctor, are going to be fine.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“In fact, about 60 percent of gun deaths in the United States are suicides, not homicides or rare accidents.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“countries. The United States has a notoriously high infant mortality rate for a rich country—6.1 deaths per thousand live births in 2010. In Finland, by comparison, it is just 2.3. But it turns out that physicians in America, like those in the UK’s Midlands, seem to be far more likely to record a pregnancy that ends at twenty-two weeks as a live birth, followed by an early death, than as a late miscarriage.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“These experiments tend to find that the benefits of receiving a small loan are quite modest, and temporary. Applying the same rigorous test to other approaches—for example, giving microentrepreneurs small cash payments along with advice from a mentor—finds that the cash-and-mentor scheme is more likely to boost the income from these tiny businesses than providing loans would.14”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“The counterintuitive result is that presenting people with a detailed and balanced account of both sides of the argument may actually push people away from the center rather than pull them in. If we already have strong opinions, then we’ll seize upon welcome evidence, but we’ll find opposing data or arguments irritating. This biased assimilation of new evidence means that the more we know, the more partisan we’re able to be on a fraught issue.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“A similar pattern holds if you measure scientific literacy: more scientifically literate Republicans and Democrats are further apart than those who know very little about science.17”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Van Meegeren admitted painting not only the work that had been found in Nazi hands, but Christ at Emmaus and several other supposed Vermeers.”
― Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Taiwan complained that in late December 2019 it had given important clues about human-to-human transmission to the World Health Organization – but as late as mid-January, the WHO was reassuringly tweeting that China had found no evidence of human-to-human transmission. (Taiwan is not a member of the WHO, because China claims sovereignty over the territory and demands that it should not be treated as an independent state. It’s possible that this geopolitical obstacle led to the alleged delay.)8”
― Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up : Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers