The Numbers Don't Lie, But People Do

“Two Weeks.” It’s a classic line from The Money Pit in which a young couple struggles hopelessly to repair a fixer-upper throughout the film. Two weeks is the number repeatedly quoted by the contractors as the time it will take to fix the house. Throughout the film, the couple maintains a dwindling glimmer of hope that the work will be done in the time quoted. Numbers make us feel safe. They’re objective, after all. People, however, are not. We use numbers to hide the truth, we misinterpret their source, we euphemize, and as we learn from The Money Pit, they’re as often as not a way to provide a false sense of security when faced with risk.

Numbers can inform us about and profoundly shape our reality. Insights from data drive not just the majority of business decisions, but design decisions, product backlogs, and even creative decisions in everything from screenwriting to game design to industrial design. This is to say nothing of the torrent of content made possible by the globs of linear algebra colloquially known as generative AI.

However, the old saying rings true. “More fiction is written in Excel than in Word.” The proverbial edge of numbers cuts pretty deeply both ways. When we’re given information in numerical form, the abstraction often blinds us to the context and source of those numbers. While a set of numbers may be factually accurate, what they entail, or what precipitated the phenomena that resulted in those numbers is, as they say, another matter entirely. The odds of a royal flush in poker are 1 in 649,739. However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play a hand of poker now and then. It means simply that you should understand the context and probabilities involved. Numbers can obscure the reality of a situation, just as they can adumbrate, or illuminate it. It’s important to remember that numbers are tools, not truths in and of themselves.

The question of accuracy aside, simply attaching a number to something tends to lend things a certain appeal to things that otherwise might lack it. Why is the iPhone 27 going to be better than the iPhone 26? I have no idea, but it certainly sounds better. Why did Web 3 gain traction? Well, it’s better than Web 2, right? It’s simply an appeal to numbers, no different than that oft-cited statistic: “The average person swallows 8 spiders a year while sleeping.” Complete nonsense, but adding the word “average” and the specific number 8 subjected an unquestioning generation to years of believing a myth ironically and intentionally propagated to highlight exactly how gullible people could be.

Numbers are an abstraction that helps our limited faculties understand a universe that was anything but designed for us. They are a tool we’ve created to help us understand and make informed decisions about the world and our course of action in it. But because they are an abstraction, they by definition create distance from that which they describe. This is encapsulated beautifully in the common phrase “just another statistic” which describes the detachment we have from victims of crime when presented in numerical form. It’s easy enough to bat around the figure that eleven thousand civilians have been killed in the Ukraine War, but it’s very difficult, painful in fact, to consider that each of those eleven thousand had a mother, a childhood, a favorite joke, a food they disliked, personality quirks, and a lived experience every single bit as real, vivid, and alive as the one you and I have.

This is the danger of numbers, it’s not just that they can be wrong, it’s that even if they are right, they allow us to shut down the part of our brain that needs to pay attention, to really squint and see the details. It’s a part of our brain that desperately needs exercise in the current media landscape. We often see industry reports, analytics dashboards, or market projections and make assumptions but in my experience, the brightest thinkers have a keen, almost intentional acknowledgment of the fact that these numbers are very much the map, that even if they are reflective of the territory there are equally valuable insights to be gained from examining it every bit as closely the myriad numerical representations we might make of it.

So, let’s get practical. First and foremost, always question the source of the numbers. Where do they come from? What biases might be present in the data collection process? Understanding the context in which the numbers were generated is crucial to interpreting them accurately.

For example, company A might show higher sales than company B. Clearly company A is the better investment. However, company B shows more consistent growth at the bottom of the pyramid while company A seems to have reached market saturation at the top. Or simply consider the logical fallacy Argumentum Ad Populum, or appeal to the people. Because more people believe company A’s product to be better does not by any stretch make it so. Vox Populi as the saying goes, is not Vox Dei.

Second, what implications or inferences are being drawn from the numbers? Do those implications necessarily follow? Or would we need to accept certain preconditions to be true alongside the numbers to accept those numbers?

According to the CDC teen birth rates are 16.7 per thousand females aged 15 to 19. We have a crisis on our hands! Teen pregnancy is a real issue plaguing the nation that needs our attention. It’s just one more warning sign along the road to the moral collapse of our great country. No. If we examine these claims with even the smallest bit of scrutiny they completely collapse. Teen birth rates have steadily declined since 1991.

In healthcare numerical data is vital for treatment decisions and policy-making, however misinterpretation of that data can lead to very serious consequences for real people. For example, if a medication reduces the risk of a condition by 50%, it sounds extremely promising. However, if the risk reduction is from 2% to 1% absolute risk, it goes without saying that the impact may be less than initially perceived. This distinction is crucial as a patient, and it’s up to healthcare providers to correctly interpret it to avoid potentially harmful consequences.

In Economics, Goodhart’s law comes to mind “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” Or as stated by Jon Danielsson “Any statistical relationship will break down when used for policy purposes.” This underscores the idea that even when we think we have a solid grasp on the numbers, using them as targets or measures can actually distort the reality they are meant to represent. When we focus solely on achieving a specific number, we may lose track of other, more important numbers, or, at the risk of sounding cliché, people.

Numbers comfort us, they inform our assumptions, they fuel our strategies, they aid us through the murky waters of uncertainty, they underlie our storied history of technological advancements, and they encode the letters you are reading at this very second. And yet…”Two weeks.”

Numbers are certainly as objective form of measurement we as a species possess, however, they are a tool, and as with any tool, they can be used for a variety of purposes, some more scrupulous than others. Numbers can instill a false sense of security and blind us to the context and inferences implied, and they can be used as a euphemism to obscure the phenomena they represent.

I am not advocating against numbers; quite the opposite. They are invaluable, instrumental, and in any case inescapable. However, I submit to you that an awareness of the distance between the numbers and the phenomena they represent can serve you incredibly well as you navigate through the world’s information.