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

Written by Tim Harford

Narrated by Tim Harford

From “one of the great (greatest?) contemporary popular writers on economics” (Tyler Cowen) comes a smart, lively, and encouraging rethinking of how to use statistics.

Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics—we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.” If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearly—understanding how our own preconceptions lead us astray—statistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter.

As “perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world” (New Statesman), Tim Harford is an expert at taking complicated ideas and untangling them for millions of readers. In The Data Detective, he uses new research in science and psychology to set out ten strategies for using statistics to erase our biases and replace them with new ideas that use virtues like patience, curiosity, and good sense to better understand ourselves and the world. As a result, The Data Detective is a big-idea book about statistics and human behavior that is fresh, unexpected, and insightful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Audio
• Release date: Feb 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780593288795

Tim Harford

Tim Harford, profesor en el Nuffield College de Oxford, es columnista del Financial Times y presenta el programa More or Less en Radio 4 (BBC). Es autor de El economista camuflado (Debolsillo, 2011), El economista camuflado ataca de nuevo (Conecta, 2014), El poder del desorden (Conecta, 2017),Cincuenta innovaciones que han cambiado el mundo (Conecta 2018) y 10 reglas para comprender el mundo (Conecta, 2021). En 2006 fue galardonado con el premio Bastiat de periodismo económico, en 2014 fue reconocido como «Comentarista económico del año» y en 2014-2015 recibió el premio a la excelencia periodística de la Royal Statistical Society y de la Society of Business Economists.

[autumnesf · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The science behind data collecting and reporting.

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very well written guide to help average people read, understand, and question statistics they may run across. Totally non-technical, with gentle understated humor, there are no formulas and nothing to frighten a math-phobe. He also makes it clear he’s not out to debunk statistics. His position is that statistics are a great tool to understand reality, but they’re frequently imperfect, so it’s good for us non-technical people to understand how they can go wrong. He ends up with a nice chapter about how as consumers of statistics our best strength is our curiosity. (In my reviews I often carp that the last chapter or two of non fiction books are substandard - not with this book, it’s uniformly enlightening and enjoyable to read.)

[jerry.yoakum · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you manage people who work with data then it should be required reading. Entertaining and education for all with many deep insights and warnings for practitioners.

[josephcamilleri-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tim Harford is an economist, best known to the general public as presenter and participant in television and radio programmes such as BBC's "Trust Me, I'm an Economist". Indeed, "How to Make the World Add Up" often references the BBC 4 "More or Less", a programme about the accuracy of numbers and statistics in the public domain. The book takes a similar approach, in that, without in any way undermining the usefulness of statistics in understanding the world around us, Harford approaches the subject with a healthy scepticism. He sets out ten rules which can help the reader question public statements based on statistics and arrive at realistic conclusions unbiased by personal prejudice or media and political spin.

[F380 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book, especially for the last rule. Always listen to or read carefully everything that catches our attention and investigate it. If there is something that doesn't fit, investigate why... (Translated from Spanish)

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Harford starts out by noting that, while Darrell Huff’s How To Lie with Statistics was important, it also can be used to undersell the importance of the right statistics. Darrell Huff, in later years, wrote a sequel (never published) called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, as he was paid to do. “Yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics—but it’s even easier to lie without them.”

But how do you know whether you have the right statistics, correctly measured? Harford advocates both reflection on your own experience and on what else might be known—being willing to update your priors, as it were. Pay careful attention to what is being counted. For example, Harford explains that some—but by no means all—of the high infant mortality in the US seems to be “the result of recording births before twenty-four weeks as live when in other countries they would be recorded as miscarried pregnancies.” Doctors in different places, that is, are different in the likelihood that they will record a pregnancy that ends at twenty-two weeks as a live birth, followed by an early death, rather than as a late miscarriage. Now we need more information, such as late miscarriage rates in various countries, to get a fuller picture. But: “For babies born after twenty-four weeks, the US infant mortality rate falls from 6.1 to 4.2 deaths per thousand live births. The rate in Finland barely shifts, from 2.3 to 2.1.” So there is something going on with how deaths are counted.

Harford also discusses the replication crisis in psychology and the effects of publication bias. As he points out, data are themselves subject to survivor bias; he notes that the blockbuster book “In Search of Excellence” offered management lessons from studying forty-three of the most outstanding corporations of that time, but within two years, a third of them were at least financially unstable.

His contrarianism also takes him down less fruitful paths. For example, he says, “Very few people have enough wealth to fund their lifestyle purely out of interest payments, and so if we want to understand how inequality manifests itself in everyday life, it makes sense to look at income rather than wealth.” Um, no; doing that makes it harder to understand why Black families get worse mortgages and live in worse neighborhoods than white families with the same income. Likewise, his generic endorsement of curiosity doesn’t account for the way that “do your own research” misinformation (Qanon, vaccine denial) works. But I was interested in the research he reported in which people were asked to rate their understanding of various political issues on which they had opinions on a scale of one to seven and then asked to elaborate on what they understood. Apparently, after doing this, “people became less likely to give money to lobby groups or other organizations that supported the positions they had once favored.”

[socprof9740 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very nice read for a general public audience, consisting of ten good habits and a golden rule on how to deal with data. There's really no math involved but a lot of interesting stories supporting the general point. Harford is a good and engaging writer.

[adzebill · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Like Gladwell if Gladwell was humble, witty, and probably true. Hardford is refreshingly skeptical about his own "turns out…" tendencies. The book is larded with great little quotes and turns of phrase, and when I got to the end I somehow felt this was not just a tour of statistical thinking but a philosophy of life: be curious, question assumptions, don't be a cynic, look for what's left out. Encouragement in these depressing times.