Chapter 7. Data Literacy
“To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you’re going to write, you have to find out what’s bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what’s good for you.”
Our concept of literacy changes every time there’s a major shift in information technology. Being literate used to mean knowing how to sign your name. At one point it meant the ability to read and write Latin. Today, being literate generally means being able to read and understand a newspaper in your own language.
There has always been some group of people with a closer link to the truth than the rest of society. At one point in our history, some of our ancestors had the capacity for language, and some didn’t. When writing was developed, we had scribes. When the printing press was developed, the author, printer, and publisher became the new gatekeepers. After we taught everyone to read a newspaper, the journalists became the class closest to truth.
Now the problem is not a widespread inability to read and write, but the vast sea of textual, audio, and video data that we wade in every day. A new skill is necessary—one that helps filter and sort through this information.
Remember the trophic pyramid? It turns out that as energy makes its way up the food chain, its transfer gets less efficient. Consumers at each level of the pyramid convert only about 10% of the chemical energy from the step below them on the food chain. The further up the chain you go, the less energy you get.
This is why we don’t usually eat a lot of other carnivores—we tend to eat either plants or things that eat mostly plants (like cows, chickens, and pigs), but we don’t tend to eat things that eat cows, chickens, or pigs (like coyotes, lions, or hawks). Agriculture can’t sustain the cost it would take to transfer that kind of energy up the food chain for all of us.
In the world of information, there’s a kind of trophic pyramid, too; just swap energy for truth. The further away from the source—the more secondhand or thirdhand operators there are—the less truth there is.
We learn this when we’re children. We’ve all played a game of “operator” or “telephone,” wherein one person whispers a message such as “I like chocolate” into the ear of the child next to them, who then repeats the received phrase to the next child. The message is whispered on and on between all the participants, filtered through satirists and bullies, until it comes out the other end: “Clay eats worms.”
All too often, we consume information at the top of the trophic pyramid of truth, and as such, we’re getting only the information that has been selected for us by a network of operators interested not in telling us the truth, but in giving us what sells. We have to move towards the base of the pyramid if we want to see what’s really going on.
As we wade through ever-rising seas of abundant information, a new skill is necessary to stay near the bottom of the pyramid: the ability to process, sort, and filter vast quantities of information, or data literacy.
Don’t worry, you’re not going to have to learn how to be a computer programmer to have a healthy information diet—just like you don’t have to be a journalist in order to read the newspaper. But the Internet is not only the best way to fill your mind with nonsense, it’s also the best way to get source-level information. In order to have a healthy information diet, you must be capable of gathering information from the lowest rung in the pyramid.
Presuming you have access to a computer and the Internet, I’ve boiled down what I mean by
You may think that you’re already digitally data literate, and that you possess all of these skills. And you may be right, this chapter may be remedial for you. But I encourage even the most profoundly critical thinkers, the most brilliant statisticians, and the most talented writers to revisit what it really means to be data literate.
Search
Knowing how to effectively and efficiently use Bing, Google, or any other major search engine is now a critical form of literacy. I suspect most people reading this book will have used Google once or twice in their lives, but it’s worth noting that Google in particular has a tremendous amount of information available via search besides its web index.
Knowing, for instance, that Google offers not only web search, but also the ability to search through scientific papers, patents, and laws through scholar.google.com gets you closer to the facts. And though most scholarly papers, even ones funded by taxpayer dollars, sadly sit behind paywalls, it’s possible to find the title of the research paper you want to read, search for the title, and find either the document itself or a decent take on it.
Knowing Google’s advanced search techniques—to search through news, blogs, discussions, and social networks, and filtering by date, time, and source—gives us a good handle on how to get the best search results.
Finally, a lot resides inside of large data repositories that aren’t findable through Google. Search literacy also means the ability to find the data you’re looking for outside of a search engine, and to constantly be on the lookout for these repositories. USASpending.gov, for instance, is an attempt by the United States government to catalog every dollar it spends on contractors. It’s an incredible resource for watchdogs and budget hawks, but you won’t find its data through Google search. Search literacy means being keenly aware of these kinds of sources, and constantly looking out for them.
Filter
In 2004, concerned with people’s willingness to believe everything they read, a 19-year-old George Washington University student named Kyle Stoneman created a website called gullible.info. The site was a daily diary of fake facts like:
As of the end of 2010, there were at least nine countries in which public flatulence was illegal. Penalties for violating the statute ranged from the equivalent of a 50 cent (US) fine to public flogging of naked buttocks to 90 days in jail.
Approximately one-half of 1% of the annual worldwide output of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is due to soft drink carbonation. Despite the availability of a nearly no-cost switch to nitrogen, soda manufacturers are thus far refusing to make the change.
Prior to the discovery of antibiotics, horse urine was commonly used to treat pink eye.
Contrary to popular belief, cats don’t actually sleep; their muscles relax and their breathing slows while the brain stays completely alert.
On any given weekday, nearly 16% of the crowd outside the Today Show has been convicted of at least one misdemeanor. Only 3.5% have been convicted of at least one felony.
Over the course of a few months, the site became immensely popular, and sometime in 2005, an overeager Wikipedia editor took one of
