AJ Kerrigan reviewed Data Detective by Tim Harford
Review of 'Data Detective' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
“The cure for boredom is curiosity,” goes an old saying. “There is no cure for curiosity.” Just so: once we start to peer beneath the surface of things, become aware of the gaps in our knowledge, and treat each question as the path to a better question, we find that curiosity is habit-forming.
This comes near the end, but feels like the heart of the book to me. In "The Data Detective", Tim Harford provides a list of rules that can help us make statistics less arcane and daunting. There is a lot of good advice and discussion along the way, highlighted by anecdotes from history and current events. But a lot of it comes down to asking questions rather than taking things at face value.I love that Harford acknowledges how easy it is to become overwhelmed, and default to cynically dismissing everything. But he challenges that:
It’s not that …
“The cure for boredom is curiosity,” goes an old saying. “There is no cure for curiosity.” Just so: once we start to peer beneath the surface of things, become aware of the gaps in our knowledge, and treat each question as the path to a better question, we find that curiosity is habit-forming.
This comes near the end, but feels like the heart of the book to me. In "The Data Detective", Tim Harford provides a list of rules that can help us make statistics less arcane and daunting. There is a lot of good advice and discussion along the way, highlighted by anecdotes from history and current events. But a lot of it comes down to asking questions rather than taking things at face value.I love that Harford acknowledges how easy it is to become overwhelmed, and default to cynically dismissing everything. But he challenges that:
It’s not that we feel every statistic is a lie, but that we feel helpless to pick out the truths. So we believe whatever we want to believe (more on that in the next chapter), and for the rest we adopt Huff’s response: a harsh laugh, a shrug, or both.
Of course, we shouldn’t be credulous—but the antidote to credulity isn’t to believe nothing, but to have the confidence to assess information with curiosity and a healthy skepticism.
This book asks you to be skeptical of statistics and their presentation, but also your own emotions and biases. In that sense it owes as much to Thinking, Fast and Slow as it does to Weapons of Math Destruction. It's well worth a read, and couldn't come at a better time.So stay curious, and of course don't trust this review at face value :). Who knows what I want you to feel, or what I'm not saying!
