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Comment by ppod | Hacker News Reader

This author has published a couple of articles like this at the New Yorker They all have this in common: the author works through some interesting and in some ways unusual cases where data or statistics have been improperly or naively applied, with some social costs. I really enjoy the articles themselves.

Then the New Yorker packages it up with a cartoon and a headline and subheadline like "Big Data: When will it eat our children?" or "Numbers: Do they even have souls?", and serves it up to their technophobic audience in a palatable way.

https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/hannah-fry

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> *Numbers don’t lie, except when they do. Harford is right to say that statistics can be used to illuminate the world with clarity and precision. They can help remedy our human fallibilities. What’s easy to forget is that statistics can amplify these fallibilities, too. As Stone reminds us, “To count well, we need humility to know what can’t or shouldn’t be counted.”*

I do have a problem with her conclusion here. Are numbers really lying if it's actually an incorrect data collection method or conflicting definitions of criteria for generation of certain numbers (like the example used in the second to last paragraph)? She seems to be pointing out a more important fact, which is that people don't question underlying data, how it was collected, and the choices those data collectors made when making a data set. People tend to take data and conclusions drawn from it as objective realities, when in reality data is way more subjective.

> Are numbers really lying if it's actually an incorrect data collection method or conflicting definitions of criteria for generation of certain numbers

Obviously it's a figurative metaphor, but it's pretty clearly a case of "this supposedly objective factual calculation is presenting an untruth."

You can still be very misleading with objectively true calculations. "There is very low stress on the patient's arteries and only a very small tear." - said patient bled to death and has only atmospheric stress now that their veins are bloodless. Less than 0.1% of their total vein area has a rip in it.

One of the points is that the act of collecting the numbers and making decisions based on them can change the underlying behavior. The numbers can be perfectly correct (how many cases does the IT department get? How long does it take on average to resolve the issue?). The goal can be correct (we want to get issues resolved faster). But as soon as you try to manage people based on those perfectly valid numbers, but things often happen.

Hannah Fry is mathematics communicator working in quite a few other media. She's been on a couple of BBC documentaries, and on a few videos on the Numberphile YouTube channel (which is also very good regardless of who's on it)

It's ironic that you accuse them of sensationalizing headlines by making up a sensationalized headline. The headline for this article is pretty neutral and sets up an interesting article that teases a very deep topic with references to books that explain it further. And the cartoon was pretty funny. This is exactly what I expect from the New Yorker and I'm rarely disappointed.

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