The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford (E

Description: The Data Detective 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. Thats a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldnt 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. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Tim Harford is an award-winning columnist, broadcaster, and economist. He is the author of Messy, Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, and the million-selling The Undercover Economist, and is the host of the Cautionary Tales podcast. He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, and in 2019 he was awarded an OBE for services to improving economic understanding. Review Praise for The Data Detective: "Lively, crystal-clear, and insightful explanations of how data are increasingly affecting our lives— a phenomenon that every educated person should understand." —Steven Pinker, author of Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters"[Harford] expertly guides us through the many ways in which data can trick us. . . . Though numbers are at the core of The Data Detective, its emotion that wields . . . power, affecting not only how we respond to data but also how we absorb it in the first place." —The Wall Street Journal "Harford is right to say that statistics can be used to illuminate the world with clarity and precision. They can help remedy our human fallibilities." —The New Yorker "The Data Detective is sure to be another success from Harford, and is a powerful tool, especially in the current climate, one that will give readers the confidence to delve into data and statistics in a new and meaningful way." —Booklist "The author argues convincingly, based on his experience and research, that statistics should be seen as a tool that can help us understand the world. . . . The Data Detective comes at the right time: we face an onslaught of statistics on critical issues. . . . a must for anyone who is curious about how to make sense of all the information about this complex world in which we live." —Finance and Development "One of the most wonderful collections of stories that I have read in a long time . . . fascinating." —Steven B. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics "Few people write about social science with the clarity and wit of Tim Harford. If youre staggered by statistics or daunted by data, this entertaining romp of a book is essential reading." —Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive "Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford." —Bill Bryson, author of The Body "Tim Harford is one of my favorite writers in the world. His storytelling is gripping but never overdone, his intellectual honesty is rare and inspiring, and his ability to make complex things simple—but not simplistic—is exceptional. The Data Detective is another one of his gems. Call it a crash course in statistical self-defense. If youre looking for an addictive page-turner that will make you smarter, this is your book. But all his other books will do as well. In fact, Id advise you to read all of them!" —Rutger Bregman, author of Utopia for Realists and Humankind"Tim Harford is one of the finest writers of nonfiction. This is another brilliant read: wise, humane, and above all illuminating. Nobody is better on statistics and numbers—and how to make sense of them." —Matthew Syed, author of Rebel Ideas "An immensely enjoyable guide to using statistics. I loved it." —Matt Parker, author of Humble Pi "We are supremely lucky to have the fabulously readable, lucid, witty, and authoritative Tim Harford to remind us why fact, reason, numbers, clarity, and truth matter, how beautiful they are, and how crucial to our understanding of the natural world and human society. Every politician and journalist should be made to read this book." —Stephen Fry "In The Data Detective, Tim Harford continues to amuse and instruct the reader with deceptively profound and broad statistical intuition and wisdom. He finds historical precedent for our modern mistakes that are delightful and enlightening and serve to make us hopeful rather than despairing about our future—a feat in itself." —Cathy ONeil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction "Thanks to Tim Harfords characteristic wit and magnetic storytelling, you may not realize youre getting an advanced course in how to understand the kind of statistics were all faced with every day. The Data Detective is certainly a fun book to read, but its also a genuinely important one." —David Epstein, author of Range "Tim Harford is a brilliant guide to a world that we humans often find overwhelming and intimidating: the world of data. This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic, and genuine curiosity has, in Harfords own words, awakened my sense of wonder about the beauty of statistics." —Maria Konnikova, author of The Biggest Bluff "Characteristic lucidity, concealed intellectual depths, wry humor—and a big unifying idea—from one of our finest economic and statistical communicators." —The Independent Review Quote Praise for The Data Detective : "Lively, crystal-clear, and insightful explanations of how data are increasingly affecting our lives-- a phenomenon that every educated person should understand." --Steven Pinker, author of Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters "[Harford] expertly guides us through the many ways in which data can trick us. . . . Though numbers are at the core of The Data Detective , its emotion that wields . . . power, affecting not only how we respond to data but also how we absorb it in the first place." -- The Wall Street Journal "Harford is right to say that statistics can be used to illuminate the world with clarity and precision. They can help remedy our human fallibilities." -- The New Yorker " The Data Detective is sure to be another success from Harford, and is a powerful tool, especially in the current climate, one that will give readers the confidence to delve into data and statistics in a new and meaningful way." -- Booklist "The author argues convincingly, based on his experience and research, that statistics should be seen as a tool that can help us understand the world. . . . The Data Detective comes at the right time: we face an onslaught of statistics on critical issues. . . . a must for anyone who is curious about how to make sense of all the information about this complex world in which we live." -- Finance and Development "One of the most wonderful collections of stories that I have read in a long time . . . fascinating." --Steven B. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics "Few people write about social science with the clarity and wit of Tim Harford. If youre staggered by statistics or daunted by data, this entertaining romp of a book is essential reading." --Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive "Nobody makes the statistics of everyday life more fascinating and enjoyable than Tim Harford." --Bill Bryson, author of The Body "Tim Harford is one of the finest writers of nonfiction. This is another brilliant read: wise, humane, and above all illuminating. Nobody is better on statistics and numbers--and how to make sense of them." --Matthew Syed, author of Rebel Ideas "An immensely enjoyable guide to using statistics. I loved it." --Matt Parker, author of Humble Pi "We are supremely lucky to have the fabulously readable, lucid, witty, and authoritative Tim Harford to remind us why fact, reason, numbers, clarity, and truth matter, how beautiful they are, and how crucial to our understanding of the natural world and human society. Every politician and journalist should be made to read this book." --Stephen Fry "In The Data Detective , Tim Harford continues to amuse and instruct the reader with deceptively profound and broad statistical intuition and wisdom. He finds historical precedent for our modern mistakes that are delightful and enlightening and serve to make us hopeful rather than despairing about our future--a feat in itself." --Cathy ONeil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction "Thanks to Tim Harfords characteristic wit and magnetic storytelling, you may not realize youre getting an advanced course in how to understand the kind of statistics were all faced with every day. The Data Detective is certainly a fun book to read, but its also a genuinely important one." --David Epstein, author of Range "Tim Harford is a brilliant guide to a world that we humans often find overwhelming and intimidating: the world of data. This entertaining, engrossing book about the power of numbers, logic, and genuine curiosity has, in Harfords own words, awakened my sense of wonder about the beauty of statistics." --Maria Konnikova, author of The Biggest Bluff "Characteristic lucidity, concealed intellectual depths, wry humor--and a big unifying idea--from one of our finest economic and statistical communicators." -- The Independent Excerpt from Book Rule One Search Your Feelings Luke Skywalker: "No . . . No. Thats not true. Thats impossible!" Darth Vader: "Search your feelings, you know it to be true!" The Empire Strikes Back (1980) Abraham Bredius was nobodys fool. An art critic and collector, he was the worlds leading scholar on Dutch painters, and particularly the seventeenth-century master Johannes Vermeer. As a young man in the 1880s, Bredius had made his name by spotting works wrongly credited to Vermeer. At the age of eighty-two, in 1937, he was enjoying something of a retirement swan song. He had just published a highly respected book in which he had identified two hundred fakes or imitations of Rembrandt. It was at this moment in Brediuss life that a charming lawyer named Gerard Boon paid a visit to his Monaco villa. Boon wanted to ask Brediuss opinion of a newly rediscovered work, Christ at Emmaus, thought to have been painted by Vermeer himself. The exacting old man was spellbound. He sent Boon away with his verdict: Emmaus was not only a Vermeer, it was the Dutch masters finest work. "We have here-I am inclined to say-the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft," wrote Bredius in a magazine article shortly after. "Quite different from all his other paintings and yet every inch a Vermeer. "When this masterpiece was shown to me I had difficulty controlling my emotion," he added, noting reverently that the work was ongerept-Dutch for "virginally pure" or "untouched." It was an ironic choice of words: Emmaus could hardly have been more corrupt. It was a rotten fraud of a painting, stiffly applied to an old canvas just a few months before Bredius caught sight of it, and hardened with Bakelite. Yet this crude trickery caught out not only Bredius, but the entire Dutch art world. Christ at Emmaus soon sold for 520,000 guilders to the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam. Compared with the wages of the time, that is well over $10 million today. Bredius himself contributed to help the museum buy the picture. Emmaus became the centerpiece of the Boijmans Museum, drawing admiring crowds and rave reviews. Several other paintings in a similar style soon emerged. Once the first forgery had been accepted as a Vermeer, it was easier to pass off these other fakes. They didnt fool everyone, but like Emmaus they fooled the people who mattered. Critics certified them; museums exhibited them; collectors paid vast sums for them-a total of more than $100 million in todays money. In financial terms alone, this was a monumental fraud. But there was more. The Dutch art world revered Vermeer as one of the greatest painters who ever lived. Painting mostly in the 1660s, he had been rediscovered only in the late 1800s. Fewer than forty of his works survive. The apparent emergence of half a dozen Vermeers in just a few years was a major cultural event. It was also an event that should have strained credulity. But it did not. Why? Dont look to the paintings themselves for an answer. If you compare a genuine Vermeer with the first forgery, Emmaus, it is hard to understand how anyone was fooled-let alone anyone as discerning as Abraham Bredius. Vermeer was a true master. His most famous work is Girl with a Pearl Earring, a luminous portrait of a young woman: seductive, innocent, adoring, and anxious all at once. The painting inspired a novel, and a movie starring Scarlett Johansson as the unnamed girl. In The Milkmaid, a simple scene of domesticity is lifted by details such as the rendering of a copper pot, and a display of fresh-baked bread that looks good enough to grab out of the painting. Then theres Woman Reading a Letter. She stands in the soft light of an unseen window. Is she, perhaps, pregnant? We see her in profile as she holds the letter close to her chest, eyes cast down as she reads. Theres a dramatic stillness about the image-we feel that shes holding her breath as she scans the letter for news; we hold our breath, too. A masterpiece. And Christ at Emmaus? Its a static, awkward image by comparison. Rather than seeming to be an inferior imitation of Vermeer, it doesnt look like a Vermeer at all. Its not a terrible painting, but its not a brilliant one either. Set alongside Vermeers works it seems dour and clumsy. And yet it, and several others, fooled the world-and might have continued to fool the world to this day, had not the forger been caught out by a combination of recklessness and bad luck. In May 1945, with the war in Europe at an end, two officers from the Allied Art Commission knocked on the door of 321 Keizersgracht, one of Amsterdams most exclusive addresses. They were met by a charismatic little man called Han van Meegeren. The young van Meegeren had enjoyed some brief success as an artist. In middle age, as his jowls had loosened and his hair had silvered, he had grown rich as an art dealer. But perhaps he had been dealing art with the wrong people, because the officers came with a serious charge: that van Meegeren had sold Johannes Vermeers newly discovered masterpiece, The Woman Taken in Adultery, to a German Nazi. And not just any Nazi, but Hitlers right-hand man, Hermann Gsring. Van Meegeren was arrested and charged with treason. He responded with furious denials, trying to bluster his way to freedom. His forceful, fast-talking manner was usually enough to get him out of a sticky situation. Not this time. A few days into his incarceration, he cracked. He confessed not to treason but to a crime that caused astonishment across the Netherlands and the art world as a whole. "Fools!" he sneered. "You think I sold a priceless Vermeer to Gsring? There was no Vermeer! I painted it myself." Van Meegeren admitted painting not only the work that had been found in Nazi hands, but Christ at Emmaus and several other supposed Vermeers. The fraud had unraveled not because anyone spotted these flawed forgeries, but because the forger himself confessed. And why wouldnt he? Selling an irreplaceable Vermeer masterpiece to the Nazis would have been a hanging offense, whereas selling a forgery to Hermann Gsring wasnt just forgivable, it was admirable. But the question remains: How could a man as expert as Abraham Bredius have been fooled by so crass a forgery? And why begin a book about statistics with a tale that has nothing at all to do with numbers? The answer to both questions is the same: when it comes to interpreting the world around us, we need to realize that our feelings can trump our expertise. When Bredius wrote, "I had difficulty controlling my emotion," he was, alas, correct. Nobody had more skill or knowledge than Bredius, but van Meegeren understood how to turn Brediuss skill and knowledge into a disadvantage. Working out how van Meegeren fooled Bredius teaches us much more than a footnote in the history of art; it explains why we buy things we dont need, fall for the wrong kind of romantic partner, and vote for politicians who betray our trust. In particular, it explains why so often we buy into statistical claims that even a moments thought would tell us cannot be true. Van Meegeren wasnt an artistic genius, but he intuitively understood something about human nature. Sometimes, we want to be fooled. Well return to the cause of Abraham Brediuss error in a short while. For now, its enough to understand that his deep knowledge of Vermeers paintings proved to be a liability rather than an asset. When he saw Christ at Emmaus, Bredius was undone by his emotional response. The same trap lies in wait for any of us. The aim of this book is to help you be wiser about statistics. That means I also need to help you be wiser about yourself. All the statistical expertise in the world will not prevent your believing claims you shouldnt believe and dismissing facts you shouldnt dismiss. That expertise needs to be complemented by control of your own emotional reactions to the statistical claims you see. In some cases theres no emotional reaction to worry about. Say I tell you Mars is more than 50 million kilometers, or 30 million miles, from Earth. Very few people have a passionately held belief about that claim, so you can start asking sensible questions immediately. For example: Is 30 million miles a long way? (Sort of. Its more than a hundred times farther than the distance between Earth and the moon. Other planets are a lot farther away, though.) Hang on, isnt Mars in a totally different orbit? Doesnt that mean the distance between the Earth and Mars varies all the time? (Indeed it does. The minimum distance between the two planets is a bit more than 30 million miles, but sometimes Mars is more than 200 million miles away.) Because there is no emotional response to the claim to trip you up, you can jump straight to trying to understand and evaluate it. Its much more challenging when emotional reactions are involved, as weve seen with smokers and cancer statistics. Psychologist Ziva Kunda found the same effect in the lab, when she showed experimental subjects an article laying out the evidence that coffee or other sources of caffeine could increase the risk to women of developing breast cysts. Most people found the article pretty convincing. Women who drank a lot of coffee did not. We often find ways to dismiss evidence that we dont like. And the opposite is tr Details ISBN0593084667 Author Tim Harford Short Title The Data Detective Pages 336 Language English Year 2022 ISBN-10 0593084667 ISBN-13 9780593084663 Format Paperback Publication Date 2022-02-01 Subtitle Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Riverhead Books,U.S. Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2022-02-01 NZ Release Date 2022-02-01 US Release Date 2022-02-01 UK Release Date 2022-02-01 Illustrations B&W DIAGRAMS THROUGHOUT DEWEY 001.422 Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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