The Math of Life and Death: 7 Mathematical Principles That Shape Our Lives by Kit Yates

Author:Kit Yates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Mathematics provides multiple ways to be economical with the truth. The stats proclaimed in newspapers, championed in ads, or spouted by politicians are frequently misleading, occasionally disingenuous, but rarely completely incorrect. The seeds of the truth are usually contained within their figures, but rarely the whole fruit. Sometimes these distortions are a result of willful misrepresentation, while on other occasions the perpetrators are genuinely unaware of the bias they are imposing or the errors in their calculations. We will explore the catastrophic consequences of such genuine mathematical mistakes in more portentous contexts in the following chapter.

In his classic book, How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff suggests that “despite its mathematical base, statistics is as much an art as it is a science.” Ultimately, the degree to which we believe the stats we come across should depend on how complete a picture the artist paints for us. If it is a richly detailed, realist landscape with context, a trusted source, clear expositions, and chains of reasoning, then we should be confident in the veracity of the numbers. If, however, it is a dubiously inferred claim, supported by a minimalist single statistic on an otherwise empty canvas, we should think hard about whether we believe this “truth.”

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