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The jury is still out on who is the real owner of the quote: “In God we trust. All others must bring data”, but in all probability, it would be a statistician. ‘Stats’ explain the world by adding accuracy and certainty to its affairs. A news story that says the coronavirus impact will shrink global GDP by 1 per cent would add a lot more value than a headline that says ‘Covid-19 to dent global GDP deeply’.
Numbers are charming when they fall in the right place, and can be alarming when they get cocktailed with bad news. For policymakers, planners and businesses, numbers are crucially sacred. They complete their story. Plato may have said a good decision is based on knowledge and not numbers. But number mavens and data doctors won’t agree. For them, numbers never lie. They represent the truth. Two plus two equals four, not six.
In recent years, the advent of modern computing and the rapid emergence of allied segments such as big data analytics has added an extra layer of intrigue and many layers of intricacy to the world of numbers, making rapid number-crunching a glamorous vocation. Statisticians and mathematicians are today paid more than ever. And their services transcend disciplines. Some statisticians are like Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and an obsessive number lover, who said: “Nothing in human nature is indeterminate. Anything and everything can be measured.”...
In this context, understanding statistics becomes an essential evolutionary skill. In Something Doesn’t Add Up: Surviving Statistics in a Post-Truth Age, mathematician Paul Goodwin offers us an exciting handbook to understand the world of numbers. “I now realise that my mathematical colleague who argued that there are two worlds — mathematics and waffle — was wrong,” writes Goodwin in the introduction to the book. “There are two worlds, but they are the world of reality and the world of numbers. And the second world is usually at best a simplification of the first and at worst a gross distortion of it.”
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| Something Doesnt Add Up |
