Curiosity can save us when lies come dressed as numbers

How asking yourself some simple questions can help you detect bullshit statistics.

…A second virtue is that of curiosity, which we might think of as a hunger to know more, coupled with a tolerance for being surprised. Simple questions such as: “I wonder how they know that?”; “Is that better or worse than I might have expected?”; “What exactly do they mean?” often unlock far more insight than narrow technical queries.

Adapted from posts originally published on the University of St Andrews Digital Communications team blog. This month I attended the Institutional Web Management Workshop at Northumbria University. The conference, aimed mainly at university web managers, has been running for 18 years. The theme of this year was rebooting the web, after a participant at last […]