Alex Edmans (Penguin Business, 25 April (UK); University of California Press, 14 May (US))
Here is a logic puzzle. You have been given four double-sided cards, each with a number on one side and a letter on the other. You are told to test this: “If a card has a vowel on one side, it has an even number on the other side.” The cards, as dealt, read “E, K, 2, 3”. Which do you turn?
If, like me, you decided on E and 2, then you need to read Alex Edmans’s book, May Contain Lies: How stories, statistics and studies exploit our biases – and what we can do about it. Answering E and 2 supports the rule but doesn’t probe its accuracy. Turning E and 3 proves the positive as well as disproving the negative – the correct answer.
Advertisement
Or, as the puts it elsewhere in his book: “But becoming more knowledgeable and making better decisions isn’t just about defending against misinformation – it’s also about positively gathering information.”
Edmans is out to help us better understand and analyse the data we are fed, and to aid us in becoming more sceptical. He shows us how data has been misrepresented in the past and how initiatives have been launched on the back of bad information. “Data is just a collection of facts,” he writes. “Evidence is data that allows you to distinguish between hypotheses – to support yours and rule out alternatives.”
Some of his examples are far-reaching. He explains how parents began foisting instruments on young children following the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, with its proposal that you can become an expert at anything if you devote 10,000 hours to it. The truth, as he discovered, is complex. Other stories are more personal. One investor approached Edmans asking him to identify metrics showing that more diverse companies achieved better financial returns – only to abandon him and choose a competitor who was willing to make the facts fit the narrative when Edmans wasn’t.
He also issues a rallying cry for rationality designed to prebunk the sort of article or book (common in the business world) that tries to stitch a neat narrative onto the successful outcome of a magnate such as Steve Jobs. We need, he says, to know how to spot such false claims before we encounter them.
Edmans outlines how two different descriptions of Apple’s success contradict each other and yet are similar: both prey on black-and-white thinking, play into confirmation bias and have an engaging narrative. Stressing that “we forget the basic scientific method when we’re told a compelling story”, Edmans aims not just at journalists but at myriad TED talks, as well as foreshadowing “factual” communication through TikTok, where people can add facts haphazardly to fit a predetermined narrative and go viral.
The author himself has been subject to such spin, as he recounts. He submitted a detailed, well-researched document to a UK parliamentary inquiry on wage disparities, as well as appearing in front of the committee, only to find his evidence misrepresented to say the opposite of what he had outlined in his final report.
His point is compelling. But it also means that Edmans is unwilling to put story before statistics. In its place, he relies on a “Ladder of Misinference”. This diagram shows how decision-making can go wrong, with the apparently sturdy rungs from “statement” to “evidence” actually open to question.
Luckily, two-thirds of his book is a page-turner. And the appendix (“a checklist for smarter thinking”) should be required reading – because too many people are going to choose the wrong cards.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
