Unleashing the Statistical Detective Within: Questioning Data & Strengthening Intuition
Develop your spider-sense for suspicious data
Remember when we were kids and we couldn’t stop asking questions? Well, believe it or not, that’s a core tenet of statistical thinking. Many of us are still like that. Even if you think you’re not, you probably still have some of it somewhere in your subconscious mind.
Every time you question a claim based on data, like “Earn $500 a day with this simple method” or “Lose 10 pounds a week with this secret!”, that statistical thinker is screaming to get out.
It’s easier being the critic than being the contestant. It’s all fun and games tearing obvious lies from afar, but it’s not so fun when it actually matters to us. Remember last election? How suspicious were you of the other party’s data? Because I bet you weren’t as critical as with the party you supported.
The point here, is that it’s hard to play detective when your mom is the suspect. A data driven mind questions everything, but that’s extremely hard to do when that “everything” includes your own identity and reasoning.
This becomes much more relevant when we take it to the workplace. When we are at work, we see a whole lot of data (reports, presentations, etc.), yet for some reason we rarely question it. An excel report with weird quantities? Count me in! A presentation with mysterious quarterly earnings? Don’t mind if I do.
Usually these documents are seen as facts, and I pity the fool who questions them because he might annoy the manager and be seen in a bad light. The problem is that this is the one place where questioning the data helps everyone. It might be annoying to have to double check or investigate again, but doing so might save time and resources, which would benefit everyone in the long run.
There’s a myriad of reasons why problems like this might occur. Political reasons like the one I just mentioned. Working under pressure might also instinctively urge you to trust the data. Even long chains of assumptions might occur, where one person assumes a number is correct and passes it on, and the next person assumes that the person before had everything in check, and so on.
I understand it’s not easy to constantly analyze data when the clock is ticking, but having the sense the data is not always right just because it’s on a spreadsheet will strengthen your intuition. If you keep this skepticism, in the long run you’ll be able to sense when something is wrong.
