The Data Detective

Hannah Fry’s book Hello World.

superforecasting is a matter of having an open-minded personality.

Ideally, a decision maker or a forecaster will combine the outside view and the inside view—or, similarly, statistics plus personal experience. But it’s much better to start with the statistical view, the outside view, and then modify it in the light of personal experience than it is to go the other way around. If you start with the inside view you

Premature enumeration is not just an intellectual failure. Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy, too.

we make a forecast with the facts that are in front of our nose.

Data visualization ducks can be more than tasteless: the duckness of the graph can actually obscure—or worse, it can misrepresent—the underlying information.

Our brains fill in the gaps—which is why we see what we expect to see and hear what we expect to hear,

it is important to understand what is being measured or counted, and how.

those questions aren’t obscure or overly technical; they are what any thoughtful, curious person would be happy to ask.