Stats all, folks

Our worship of data can skew outcomes in everything from workplace, sport and lifestyle decisions to how countries are run, writes GREG BRUCE.

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In 2015, I began work as a journalist at The New Zealand Herald. Over the next nine years, the value of my contribution to my employer was increasingly determined by a single data point: the number of people clicking on my articles and then clicking "subscribe to the Herald". Bonuses for me and many of my colleagues were tied specifically to boosting that number and only that number. In one meeting, a respected senior journalist summed up the mood: "I'm sick of being treated like a number." In May this year, I was made redundant. Data, I believed, could go and get fucked.

Having said that, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the genesis of this article was, at least in part, based on knowing that the line “how data can skew outcomes” would get a lot of clicks.

LIFE, DEATH & DATA

The ultimate case of real-world, data-driven decision-making landed here in 2020, when Covid-19 turned seemingly everyone into a data scientist overnight. People who had never before thought seriously about using the phrase “regression to the mean” became instant experts in how best to apply the concepts they heard on the news. Meanwhile, real scientists were struggling to figure out what was happening and how to deal with it.

Shaun Hendy, then-director of Te Pūnaha Matatini Centre for Complex Systems and Networks, a national centre of research excellence, was at the heart of modelling the potential spread of the disease. In his first few months working on the response, he says, “We were just absolutely desperate for data”, which he describes as “situation normal’ for scientists.

At the beginning of the pandemic, he was so short of usable data he was transcribing Ashley Bloomfield’s press conferences to get it.