The Art of Statistics

The Art of Statistics is a non-technical book that shows how statistics is helping humans everywhere get a new hold of data, interpret numbers, fact-check information, and reveal valuable insights, all while keeping the world as we know it afloat.

Data is only one part of the story. Statisticians use numbers and patterns to create their studies, but part of their job is to understand what they’re measuring first. If their data comes from a study where people were surveyed, the final product may not be quite an objective truth.

Instead, the result is a representation of the study. Consider that a lot of data is collected from focus groups or questionnaires that ask people to relate to their experiences.

Therefore, data may be biased (e.g., if you’re interviewing women about their experiences with sexual harassment and you ask men, your data will be very different). However, statistics are still highly useful in our world.

They help us in all areas of work and make a huge difference in time and money spent on projects. They also offer faster and better results (if the data input is correct) and help provide answers in critical situations.

For example, if you’re chasing a murderer as a policeman, you’re likely going to use statistics to calculate common patterns. This is how plenty of detectives came to a breakthrough discovery in their cases.

Data is often displayed in a way that is meant to be eye-catching and exciting but could be misleading. For example, consider the recent study on the effects of coffee consumption on heart disease. The results were presented as follows:

“Drinking coffee every day can reduce your risk of heart disease”. This sounds like good news for coffee drinkers, but it’s not quite that simple. The researchers found that drinking two to three cups of coffee per day reduced your risk of heart disease.

However, there’s something important missing here: what if you only drink one cup per day? Or four cups? What about six? It turns out that this study doesn’t tell us much about how many cups are safe to drink; it only tells us how many cups are beneficial.

The media tends to take this type of information and present it in a way that makes it seem more definitive than it really is—and often exaggerates the findings to get people clicking through their sites and sharing articles on Facebook.

You should be able to interpret the data you’re looking at because the media often over-exaggerates it in order to increase web traffic. The way data is displayed has a large impact on how we use it, so check your sources carefully.