STATISTICS

Water Cooler Small Talk, Ep 4: Simpson’s Paradox

Is your data tricking you? What can you do about it?

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Water cooler small talk is a special kind of small talk, typically observed in office spaces around a water cooler. There, employees frequently share all kinds of corporate gossip, myths, and legends, inaccurate scientific opinions, indiscreet personal anecdotes, or outright lies. Anything goes. So, in my Water Cooler Small Talk posts, I discuss strange and usually scientifically invalid opinions I’ve overheard in the office that have left me speechless.

Here’s the water cooler moment of today’s post:

Let’s keep it simple — I just need one number that shows the big picture, the aggregated data. There is no need to overcomplicate things…

Sure, but what if the big picture is hiding the real story?🤷🏻‍♀️ What if things are in fact just complicated? Business users love the concept of ‘just one number’ — it’s simple, it’s clean, it’s easy to understand. Nonetheless, reality rarely aligns with ‘just one number’. More often than not, the real world is much more complex and nuanced, with layers and layers of information and details, and a single number can’t tell us much about what is really happening.