The human brain, a marvelous thing,
Designed to dance, to laugh, to sing,
It builds a jet, it writes a tune,
It put a rover on the moon.
But show it charts and data sets,
And see how grumpy that it gets.
For deep within our cranial wiring,
A different circuit keeps on firing.
We don’t like math, we don’t like graphs,
We’d rather have a couple laughs,
And listen to a story told,
By someone loud and brash and bold.
We call it “truth,” we call it “fact,”
Because we saw the interaction.
But scientists, they weep and moan,
When we rely on what is known,
By just one guy, named “Neighbor Jim,”
And base our worldview strictly on him.
The Sample Size of Number One,
Is where the logic comes undone.
It is the anecdotal trap,
That wipes the logic off the map.
Let’s look at cars, a classic case,
Of how the numbers lose the race.
The magazines, with testing fleets,
Have run the sedans through the streets.
They’ve driven miles, ten thousand strong,
To see what works and what goes wrong.
They print a chart, a lovely grid,
Of what the transmission actually did.
“The Brand X Car,” the data shows,
“Is quite the best of all of those.
It rarely breaks, it runs on air,
It’s reliable beyond compare.”
You read the stats, you nod your head,
You’re nearly sure, you’re almost led,
To go and buy this Brand X ride,
With statistical comfort on your side.
But then you meet your cousin Clyde.
Now Clyde is not a car expert,
He wears a mustard-stained t-shirt.
He’s not a whiz at engineering,
But he is loud and domineering.
“Don’t buy Brand X!” he shouts with glee,
“I bought one back in ’93!
The window stuck! The radio died!
I tell you, friend, I almost cried!
That car is junk, it’s trash, it’s rust,
A bucket that you cannot trust!”
And suddenly, the data fades,
Dissolving in the mental shades.
Ten thousand cars were tested fine?
Who cares! ‘Cause Clyde, in ’99,
Once had a fuse that blew apart.
And that is where the errors start.
The Bell Curve represents the whole,
But stories touch the human soul.
The average creates a snore,
Exceptions are what we adore.
We weigh the story of a friend,
Much heavier than the trends that tend,
To show us reality is vast,
And not defined by Clyde’s own past.
Consider now the lottery,
A tax on inability,
To do the math of probability.
The odds are long, the odds are grim,
The chance of winning is so slim,
You’re likely to be struck by lightning,
While swimming with a shark that’s biting.
The stats say: “Save your dollar bill,
The jackpot is a steep uphill.”
But then you see on Channel Four,
A lady at the grocery store.
She holds a check, oversized and cardboard,
She screams and shouts, completely overboard.
“I played my numbers! One, two, three!
And now I’m rich as rich can be!”
Your brain lights up, the neurons fire,
Igniting hope and deep desire.
“She won,” you think, “and she’s like me,
So winning is a certainty!”
You disregard the million losers,
The sad and broke and ticket-choosers,
Who bought a scratch-off every day,
And threw their pension checks away.
You never see them on the screen,
They remain statistically unseen.
You only see the single winner,
And so you skip a proper dinner,
To buy a ticket, dream and pray,
Ignoring what the numbers say.
Because an anecdote has a face,
While data takes up empty space.
Then there is the fear of flight,
That keeps you up awake at night.
You check the safety stats online,
They say the planes are doing fine.
It’s safer than your living room,
It’s safer than a bride and groom,
Walking down the church’s aisle,
It’s safer by a country mile,
Than driving to the corner shop,
To buy a soda and a mop.
The highway is a danger zone,
With texting drivers on the phone.
The stats are clear, the risk is high,
Whenever cars go zipping by.
But on the news, what do you see?
A twisted wing, a tragedy.
A single crash, a smoke-filled sky,
And suddenly you’d rather die,
Than step aboard a Boeing jet.
The safety record you forget.
“I saw the crash!” you tell your spouse,
“I’m staying safe inside the house.
Or we will drive to Timbuktu,
Because I trust my Subaru.”
You trust the car, which crashes more,
Because you control the door.
The anecdote of one plane crash,
Turns logical thinking into ash.
The vividness of fear and dread,
Overwrites the math inside your head.
It happens too with weather talk,
When folks go out to take a walk.
The climate trends are measured slow,
Decades of heat began to grow.
The ice is melting, oceans rise,
According to the expert eyes.
The global average creeps up high,
Beneath a carbon-loaded sky.
But then in March, or maybe May,
We have a freezing, snowy day.
Out steps the skeptic, coat in hand,
Looking across the frozen land.
“Global warming?” he asks with sneer,
“My driveway is slippery, look here!
There’s ice upon my windshield glass,
It’s freezing on the meadow grass.
How can the world be getting hot,
If I am cold right in this spot?”
He uses his thermometer,
As if it were the parameter,
For every nation, pole to pole,
Ignoring the collective whole.
“I feel the cold,” he says with pride,
“So all the scientists have lied.”
He takes his local, small event,
And treats it like an argument,
That disproves data world-wide gathered.
He doesn’t care, he isn’t bothered,
That weather isn’t climate trends.
His vision starts and also ends,
At the tip of his own frozen nose.
And that is how the thinking goes.
The root of this, the reason why,
We let the cold hard numbers die,
Is that we lived in tribes of old,
Where every story that was told,
Was vital info we must save,
To keep us from an early grave.
If Ugg the Caveman ate a berry,
And then got sick and very scary,
You didn’t need a double-blind,
Peer-reviewed study of his kind.
You just stopped eating berries red,
Or else you’d end up cold and dead.
We’re wired to learn from one event,
To trust the message that is sent,
By eyes and ears and family kin.
It is the skin that we are in.
But now the world is big and vast,
And complex things are moving fast.
The single story often lies,
Or represents a weird surprise,
An outlier, a freakish case,
That doesn’t represent the base.
Yet still we stand, and pontificate,
And use our stories to debate.
“I know a guy,” the sentence starts,
And blows the science all apart.
“I know a guy who fixed his roof,
With bubblegum! I have the proof!
So roofing nails are just a scam,
I’ll fix my shingles with some jam!”
“I know a guy who never saves,
He spends his money, rants and raves,
And then he found a diamond ring!
So saving is a stupid thing!”
“I know a guy who dropped his phone,
Upon a jagged pavement stone.
It didn’t crack, it didn’t break!
So phone cases are just a fake!
Those silicone protectors, pal?
Are just a way to steal morale.
My naked phone survived the drop,
So I advise that you should stop,
Using cases on your gear.
The evidence is very clear!”
We extrapolate from N of one,
And think the research job is done.
We trust the vivid, emotional tale,
Over the spread-sheet’s dry detail.
Because the truth is often bland,
Like grains of undistinguished sand.
While anecdotes are shining gems,
Or thorny, twisting flower stems.
They catch the eye, they stick in mind,
Leaving the averages behind.
So next time stats say “X is true,”
But you recall a time when YOU,
Experienced “Y” instead of “X,”
Don’t let the contradiction vex.
Don’t throw the data in the bin,
And let the anecdote begin,
To rule your mind with iron fist.
Remember that the stats exist,
To show the forest, not the tree.
To show the vast reality.
Your story’s real, it happened, yes,
But it’s a single, tiny guess,
In a world of billions, churning round.
Where truth in numbers can be found.
But let’s be honest, come what may,
We’ll list to Clyde anyway.