Data always has a story to tell. Many stories, actually.
I just heard, for the first time, about a man named Abraham Wald. This was a man that knew how to use data to uncover a story.
In short, Wald was a mathematician trained at the University of Vienna in the 1930s. By WW2, he had immigrated to New York and spent the war years working as part of a classified research group that “assembled might of American statisticians to the war effort — something like the Manhattan Project.”
One of the problems that this group worked on was how to best armor the planes. Too much armor makes the planes too heavy, but too little… well, that’s obvious I suppose 😬
The group looked at the bullet hole distribution on the planes that returned. It wasn’t uniform. The planes had significantly more holes in the fuselage (let me save you that Google search, it’s the main body of the plane) than in the engines.
So, all of these brilliant people came to Wald to ask him how much armor they should put on the fuselage in order to protect the plane.
(I’m sure that you can all feel there’s a twist coming – who’s already figured out what it is?)
Wald answered that they shouldn’t be worried about where the bullet holes are. They should be worried about where they aren’t.
BECAUSE – and once you hear it, it’s so obvious – it’s not that the enemy was not hitting the engines of the planes. It’s that the planes that got hit in the engine were not coming back.
“The missing bullet holes were on the missing planes. The reason planes were coming back with fewer hits to the engine is that planes that got hit in the engine weren’t coming back.”
I suppose that what I want to say here is that data, or at least what we do with it and how we interpret it, is highly subjective.
So – what stories can your data tell you? What problem(s) are you facing, and how can you use those stories to solve them?
Seriously, though. I want to know. Let’s talk data and storytelling.
Source of quotes, info about Ward, and general inspiration for the direction for the post: https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-be-wrong-by-jordan-ellenberg-664e708cfc3d