Is statistics the most boring word ever?

    I recently told a couple of close friends of mine that I had started reading 'The Art of Statistics' by David Spiegelhalter. It would be fair to say they weren't as interested in at as I was. One response read "you're so boring it physically pains me", while the other consisted of just three words" "that looks awful". It is also fair to say that those reactions are not particularly surprising. This is not to say my friends are idiots (I'm not not saying this) but more related to the world's relationship with numbers, stats, and data in general. In my experience, it's not a subject that excites people. I want that to change so I have a few examples of numbers actually being exciting. 
    Everyone likes movies, right? Way more exciting than statistics. What about movies about statistics? Terrible? Nope. Ask anyone who has seen Moneyball. It is literally a film about data analysis. The whole plot is a story of how data analysis can be used as a management tool in baseball and the film was nominated for six Oscars. It may be that the sporting underdog story is one that is always popular but there is actually very little actual baseball shown in the film. Most of the action takes place in the offices and a young Jonah Hill, playing the role of a Stanford Economics graduate who champions the use of data in making management decisions, is the reason for the success above any athlete. And his weapon is a big spreadsheet. 
    That was an example of stats being powerful in a workplace, possibly not groundbreaking news, so what about entertainment factor? This brings me to one of my favourite Twitter accounts: Duncan Alexander, @oilysailor. Self-described as 'luxury sports content', his 67.9k followers are evidence that number-based content can definitely be popular. An example of this is the following tweet:

    A Messi vs Sunderland goalscoring chart for the 2010s. A bizarre comparison that is surprisingly close and an example of a graph actually making something better (admittedly it would probably be inappropriate to write fake commentary around most charts). It shows how interesting data and stats can be in the right context and is one aspect of football you can't argue about. Another highlight of his are the constant reminders that in the Premier League, a team has a 93% of winning, despite the common saying that a 2 goal lead is 'dangerous'. Stats 1, old people sayings 0. 

 To prove that what is actually making those examples interesting isn't just the sporting context, my third example is from the business world. There was a video of Jeff Bezos in 1997 explaining why he chose to sell books as the first product category on Amazon. He said, "Books were great as the first best because books are incredibly unusual in one respect, that is that there are more items in the book category than there are items in any other category by far... in the book space there are over 3 million different books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, more than 1.5 million in English alone. So when you have that many items you can literally build a store online that couldn't exist any other way." The richest man ever became the richest man ever because he launched a business based on numbers! If this doesn't impress you then this is a lost cause. 

    Even beyond these three cases, the actual book that prompted this post is full of loads of examples that show why the world of statistics is way more interesting than it is given credit for (and I dropped maths after my GCSEs). 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Oppenheimer

  Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds Is history predefined, and scientists and explorers merely revealing what is written, or do we have agency? In other words, Oppenheimer fathered the atomic bomb but feared the Russians were making similar process, and that the Germans were further ahead. This points to the bomb as a stepping stone on the path on which technology was travelling anyway. It just happened that Oppenheimer was leading the way at the time. How does this apply in general? Where are we headed? Are our possibilities predefined? Are we unlocking achievements and discoveries, video game style? Or is there a world without Oppenheimer, where weapons of mass destruction remained in the comic books and sci fi? It is simplistic to state it was his work alone, rather than the culmination of centuries of academic progress in physics, but the same point stands, in my opinion, for each achievement and discovery made on the way. Personal brilliance or inevitab...
Read more

Weekend in Berlin

You said you like techno? Name three of their songs. Despite being a poor attempt at humour, this was my view of what I considered a rather intimidating music genre in its home city. I had heard all of the stories about Berghain; you can’t smile, they don’t like English people, you have to have a ‘look’. Any information I could find on the topic was just as vague as it was useful. I landed in Berlin then, with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Our first day was spent hitting all the tourist spots in Berlin, but it all felt like a distraction, or a way to pass the time, until the main event. As night fell, excitement rose. A  monday night , surely it’ll be quiet. After a round of naps, our alarms rang and so began our night. Several outfit changes later, we got on the U-Bahn and headed to Tresor, a club with an amazing reputation as one of the cities best, but supposedly with a reasonably forgiving door policy. Negotiating the labyrinth of dodgy dealers on the way in, the ab...
Read more

Life of Pi and Self-Isolation

   Another day of self-isolation. Another day of infinite possibilities but few achievements. I thought I'd use the gift of time by reading a book recommended by a friend, Life of Pi. Most people will have seen the famous movie poster: a young Indian boy stood in a boat next to a tiger, but, having never seen the film, I hadn't thought too much into the actual implications of such a situation. Despite what you will have seen in Tiger King on Netflix, an adult tiger probably isn't the best companion. Beyond this obvious fact. The story is an incredible (fictional) account of a young boy using knowledge of animals, picked up from time in his father's zoo, and ingenious improvisation to allow him to survive living on a lifeboat for months.      This being the plot, it was a surprising place to be confronted with a discussion on religion and, in particular, a multi-faith system of belief. The book begins with the protagonist, Pi, becoming engrossed in Hinduism, Chri...
Read more