Book Buzz

BY JOANI AND CLIFF MASKELL

SWIMMING SAFARI SWIM SCHOOL

One of my favorite stories is about Florence Nightingale. In 1854, Nightingale was persuaded by the British Secretary of War to lead a delegation of nurses to Istanbul. She used data analysis to save countless soldiers in the Crimea War while working at a hospital in Turkey. In 1861, Pasteur published his germ theory which proved that bacteria caused diseases, but the Crimea War was from 1853 to 1856. As soon as she arrived in Turkey, Nightingale started to disinfect the British hospitals and surrounding areas of unsanitary conditions. As with any new process not everyone agreed with her cleaning efforts, plus she was a “woman” giving directions to the British generals and doctors. In 1858, Florence Nightingale published her color graphic called the Nightingale’s “Rose Diagram.” This graphic illustrates that epidemic disease was responsible for more British deaths during the Crimean War than battlefield wounds. Florence Nightingale was the first female member of the London Statistical Society. The Data Detective, by Tim Harford, reminds all of us, whether we run a swim school or a scientific lab, that data and the interpretation of the data is important and crucial to succeed. The Data Detective’s introduction starts with the old story about storks delivering babies. Harford explains that statistics can even confirm that stork populations and the number of births in a country are correlated. This isn’t true, of course, but a scientific paper has been published with the title “Storks Deliver Babies (p=0.008).” A p-value less than 0.05 is statistically significant. The introduction of Tim Harford’s book is titled “How to Lie with Statistics.”

Harford’s stories give us clues on how data has been manipulated in the past. There is a story about how cigarette marketing executives met in 1953, specifically to create doubt that cigarettes were harmful. In another story, Harford tells us about how Galileo’s new telescope could see the mountains on the moon. The skeptics would not look through his telescope, because the universally held belief was that the moon was a perfectly smooth sphere. These skeptics did not want to be influenced, so instead made up a lie, saying his telescope was a trick. There are many more stories, included in the book, that illustrate motivated reasoning, unconscious bias, educational bias, social acceptance bias, gender bias, and expert bias. He also uses Daniel Kahneman book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” to point out that we use “premature numeration” or in other words, our initial reaction to make judgements.

It isn’t that all statistics are a lie, but we are helpless to decipher the truth because of how the data is presented. We believe what we want to believe. If we no longer can pick out what is true, we would never have figured out the relationship of storks to the number of babies born, nor the relationship of the number of cars on the road to lung cancer. We need both a healthy curiosity and a healthy skepticism. In high school, we are taught algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus but not how to analyze data. This story telling book is an entertaining guide of statistics.

Harford gives 10 easy rules on how to make sense of statistics. The book is not intended to make you a statistician but only hopes to educate you on how to “Be Curious.” Correlation does not mean causation.

Tim Harford is an economist, journalist, and broadcaster. Harford awards include: “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire” by Queen Elizabeth II in 2019 for services to Improving Economic Understanding, Royal Statistical Society’s 2010 award for statistical excellence in broadcast journalism, won Mensa’s award for promoting intelligence in public life, and was awarded the Bastiat Prize for economic journalism in 2007. He is author of “The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy”, “Messy”, and the million-selling “The Undercover Economist”. Tim is a senior columnist at the Financial Times, and the presenter of Radio 4’s “More or Less”, the iTunes-topping series “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy”, and the new podcast “Cautionary Tales”. He is an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Harford was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy, politics, and economics and then a Master of Philosophy in economics, in 1998. The cover of his book has Malcom Gladwell’s dedication, “He’s a genius at telling stories that illuminate our world.”