How to Make the World Add Up by Tim Harford. Ten rules for thinking differently about numbers :
1. Search your feelings - stop and notice your emotional reactions and feelings about the claim, if we don’t master our emotions, whether they are telling us to doubt or telling us to believe, we’re in danger of fooling ourselves. We shouldn’t accept or reject it because of how it makes us feel.
2. Ponder your personal experience - we should constructively sense-checking the claim against our personal experience and take both perspectives, the worm’s view and the bird’s view especially when we don’t understand the statistics.
3. Avoid premature enumeration - we should ask what is being counted, what stories lie behind the statistics and try to understand what’s really being described.
4. Step back and enjoy the view - we should look for comparisons and context, putting any claim into perspectives.
5. Get the back story - the media reports always fail to give the back story of a scientific findings. They simply regurgitated the scientific research without any indication of whether it accorded with, or contradicted, anything that had already been discovered. Look behind the statistics at where they came from - and what other data might have vanished into obscurity.
6. Ask who is missing - 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 realised are leading us astray. The conclusions might differ if the missing data included.
7. Demand transparency when the computer says ‘no’ - we shouldn’t be too eager to entrust our decisions to algorithms. We need to assess algorithms performance on a case-by-case basis, through scrutiny, transparency and debate.
8. Don’t take statistical bedrock for granted - we should pay more attention to the bedrock of official statistics- and the sometimes heroic statisticians who protect it.
9. Remember that misinformation can be beautiful too - don’t be fooled by the beautiful data visualisations and catchy graphics, we should look under the surface and recognise that someone is trying to persuade you of something.
10. Keep an open mind - sometimes we make mistakes not because the data aren’t available, but because we refuse to accept what they are telling us, or the facts have changed over time.
The Golden Rule - be curious. Look deeper and ask questions - open-minded, genuine questions. The Royal Society's motto ‘Nullius In Verba’ is taken to mean 'take nobody's word for it'.
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