It’s the Market Research Society conference this week. The statistician, David Spiegelhalter was one of the opening speakers. He starts is book “The Art of Statistics” with a quote from Nate Silver (Statistician and founder of FiveThirtyEight) which is one of my all-time favourite data quotes:
The numbers have no way of speaking for themselves. We speak for them. We imbue them with meaning.
People often say “the numbers speak for themselves” but Nate says they don’t. I agree and so does David Speigelhalter. This morning, David Speilgelhalter told the Market Research Society that the COVID-19 pandemic had brought about a fundamental change in how we view data and evidence. While data won’t tell us what to do it does tell us what’s going on. Those who work with data must give it meaning through interpretation.
Those of us who work with numbers will all have been in situations when we share our work and people respond by saying things like “I’m crap at maths”, “I don’t do numbers”, “maths scares me” and so on.
The Nate Silver quote reminds me of those situations. It reminds me of the responsibility those of us who work with numbers have. It is only through our careful interpretation and considered communication of results that we allow the numbers to speak for themselves.
This gives us a responsibility to communicate with clarity, to give our audience reassurance and with simplicity, to give our audience the confidence to be curious.
