The Data Detective

Caroline Criado Perez about her book Invisible Women.

I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.

Does conformity vary in its power depending on who is under pressure to conform to whom?

But bigger isn’t always better. It’s perfectly possible to reach vast numbers of people while still missing out on enough other people to get a disastrously skewed impression of what’s really going on.

If we want to be able to trust the world around us, we need to show an interest and ask a few basic questions.

once we start to peer beneath the surface of things, become aware of the gaps in our knowledge, and treat each question as the path to a better question, we find that curiosity is habit-forming.

As our communication, leisure, and commerce are moving to the internet, and the internet is moving into our phones, our cars, and even our spectacles, life can be recorded and quantified in a way that would have been hard to imagine just a decade ago.

Muhammad Yunus, an economist, microfinance pioneer, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has contrasted the “worm’s-eye view” of personal experience with the “bird’s-eye view” that statistics can provide.

A surprising statistical claim is a challenge to our existing worldview. It may provoke an emotional response—even a fearful one.