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Zusammenfassung von The Data Detective

Name: The Data Detective
Rating: 4.4 (225 reviews)
Author: Tim Harford

Tim Harford

Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

4.4 (225 Bewertungen)

32 Min.

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What’s in it for me? Cut through the lies and half-truths and start to truly understand statistics.

Did you know that storks deliver babies? Statistics prove it: In countries with higher stork populations, more babies are born than in countries with low stork populations.

This, of course, isn’t true –⁠ storks don’t deliver babies. But it’s very easy to make it seem like they do, using faulty statistical arguments. The ease of lying with statistics has made many people understandably leery of them.

The trouble is that without statistics, we’d never have discovered that cigarette smoking makes you 16 times likelier to get lung cancer or that COVID-19 is transmitted human-to-human.

These blinks will give you ten strategies for understanding statistics, so you can enjoy the wisdom of the good while confidently discarding the bad.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how a famous art critic was tricked by a forgery;
why it’s good that London’s murder rate is higher than New York’s; and
why experts are such terrible forecasters.

Notice your emotional reactions to data and information.

Abraham Bredius was an art critic, collector, and world-renowned expert on Dutch painters. He had special expertise when it came to Johannes Vermeer, the seventeenth-century master revered for works like Girl With a Pearl Earring.

One day in 1937, a lawyer named Gerard Boon paid Bredius a visit to show him a recently discovered Vermeer painting called Christ at Emmaus. Bredius was immediately awestruck,⁠ but he was still careful. He inspected the painting for all the signs of forgery –⁠ and found none.

Bredius declared Emmaus a genuine Vermeer, perhaps even his finest work. He also said that when he saw the painting, he “had difficulty controlling his emotion.” Unfortunately, Bredius’s heightened emotions were his undoing – because Christ at Emmaus was totally fake.

The key message here is: Notice your emotional reactions to data and information.

Emmaus wasn’t even a very good painting, but still, Bredius was fooled. He wanted so badly to believe that Emmaus was a genuine Vermeer that his emotions clouded his logical reasoning. Unfortunately, most people are likely to be fooled in just the same way when presented with information that stirs their emotions.

Some statistics don’t cause emotional reactions –⁠ no one gets upset when they hear “Mars is more than 30 million miles away from Earth.” But other issues –⁠ particularly political ones –⁠ easily get a rise out of us.

When that happens, we’re likely to ignore the information if it doesn’t fit our preconceived beliefs or use it as evidence if it does. Expertise in a subject doesn’t make us immune to that effect –⁠ in fact, some studies have shown that experts are even less likely to change their opinions in the face of contradictory evidence. That’s because they’re both motivated to avoid uncomfortable information and good at producing arguments in their own favor.

So no one is immune to motivated reasoning. Fortunately, following a couple of simple protocols can help you reduce your likelihood of doing it.

It starts with noticing how you feel when you see a statistical claim. Are you outraged, overjoyed, or in denial? After noticing your emotions, pause and reflect to see whether you’re straining to reach a particular conclusion. Your commitment to weighing the facts will help you think more clearly – and, as an added bonus, you’ll set an example of clear thinking for others, too.

Learn when it’s better to trust a statistical claim or personal experience.

When the author got his job as a presenter on a BBC radio show, he immediately fell in love with the work. But he was less fond of the morning commute from East to West London. He had to ride a crowded bus and then the tube – a subway train – that was practically bursting at the seams.

Because of those miserable mornings, the author was interested in learning more about just how busy London’s public transport system actually was. He was shocked to find that the average occupancy of a London bus was just 12 people, and on the tube, it was less than 130.

Carefully consider what a statistic is actually measuring.

In the late-2010s, the UK seemed to be in the midst of an infant mortality crisis. Rates of early death varied substantially across the country – and at first, it wasn’t clear why.

It turned out that the difference in mortality rates ultimately resulted from differences in definition – specifically, whether a baby born at 22 or 23 weeks should be recorded as a miscarriage or a live birth followed by an early death. In London, those pregnancies were recorded as miscarriages. In the English Midlands, by contrast, they were instead considered live births. The difference was enough to explain the gap in mortality rate at London versus Midlands hospitals.

Put claims into context before you draw conclusions.

Alarming headlines blared out from London’s newspapers in April 2018. They all read some variation of: “London’s Murder Rate is Higher Than New York’s for the First Time Ever!”

Setting aside the fact that the definition of “murder” is different in each city, the claim was technically true. There were 14 murders in New York City in February 2018, while in London, there were 15.

Even scientific research can be influenced by bias.

Have you heard about the famous jam-tasting experiment run by psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper? In it, the researchers set up a jam-tasting stall that sometimes offered 24 varieties of jam and other times offered six. After customers tasted the jam, they were given a voucher to buy it at a discount. Ultimately, the bigger display attracted more customers – but only three percent of them ended up buying the jam. Meanwhile, 30 percent of customers bought the jam at the smaller display. The psychologists concluded that people respond better to fewer choices and worse to more choices.

Since its publication, the study has become a sensation. You can find the results plastered everywhere, from pop-psychology articles to TED Talks. But can we trust them?

Statistics and data aren’t always equally applicable to all people.

How much pressure do people feel to conform to their peers? There’s a large amount of research suggesting that the answer is: a lot.

In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a study in which he showed subjects two images. One depicted three lines of different lengths, and the other depicted a “reference line.” Their task was simply to identify which of the three lines was the same length as the reference line.

Maintain a healthy skepticism of algorithms and big data.

Upon its release in 2009, Google Flu Trends was touted as a revolutionary tool in tracking the spread of seasonal influenza. By counting searches for “flu symptoms” and “pharmacies near me,” Google could accurately estimate new daily flu cases faster than the CDC.

Google Flu Trends was in many ways the herald of a new age: that of “big data” and algorithms. Big data refers to the information we produce when we surf the web, pay with credit cards, or use mobile phones. Algorithms are computer programs often used to find patterns in datasets.

Don’t dismiss the importance and usefulness of official statistics.

The Congressional Budget Office was established in the US in 1974 to provide Congress with reports on the budgetary costs of policy proposals. As one CBO official described it, the process was like dropping a bill down into a manhole and then having the cost estimates sent back up 20 minutes later –⁠ objective and noncontroversial.

But not every president accepted the CBO’s estimates with grace. The first president to complain was Jimmy Carter, who wanted to improve America’s energy efficiency. But the CBO evaluated Carter’s proposals for doing so and found they wouldn’t work as well as planned. The Carter administration was unhappy because the CBO “wasn’t helping.” But that was precisely the point –⁠ the best government organizations will present statistics accurately, whether or not they make politicians happy.

Don’t be fooled by the slick aesthetics of a graph or chart.

David McCandless, author of Information is Beautiful, once produced a striking and unforgettable animation called Debtris. Just like the classic computer game Tetris, Debtris showed large colored blocks falling to the bottom of a screen. The size of each block represented the cost of various items, like the UN budget, the estimated cost of the 2003 Iraq war, and Walmart’s revenue.

The catchy music, colorful graphics, and slow presentation of the various comparisons are beautiful to look at. But unfortunately, those elements obscure the many problems in the data used to make the graphic.

Always keep an open mind and be willing to revise your opinions.

Philip Tetlock was a young Canadian-born psychologist who, along with a group of other social scientists, had been given a huge task: prevent nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union. To do that, Tetlock interviewed countless experts to get their take on all the possibilities about what might happen next and why.

However, Tetlock became frustrated when he found that experts of all stripes were extremely stubborn, constantly refusing to change their minds when given contradictory evidence. Many of them were also relentless in trying to justify incorrect forecasts they’d made in the past. So Tetlock created a devious study that vividly showed just how bad the forecasters were at forecasting.

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Worum geht es in The Data Detective?

The Data Detective (2021) is a smart, practical guide to understanding the ways in which statistics –⁠ and our reactions to them –⁠ distort and obscure reality. Using psychological research and illuminating examples, it reveals some of the ways our brains influence how we see data and statistics and how we draw incorrect conclusions as a result. By picking apart our cognitive biases and misconceptions, we gain the ability to see data, and in turn, the world, for what it really is.

Bestes Zitat aus The Data Detective

With reliable statistics, citizens can hold their governments to account and those governments can make better decisions.

—Tim Harford

Wer The Data Detective lesen sollte

News and social media addicts
Avid consumers of scientific articles and research
Anyone who regularly comes into contact with data or statistics

Über den Autor

Tim Harford is an economist, author, and presenter of the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series More or Less. He writes “The Undercover Economist” column for the Financial Times and is an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He’s written several books on economics, including The Undercover Economist and Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy.

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