Darrell Huff wrote How to Lie with Statistics way back in 1954. It’s not just about lying with statistics; it’s about completely bungling your interpretation of what you think you’ve noticed. Some people even write books based on that kind of bungling.
I haven’t read Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant, but I have read an article he wrote: What Your Web Browser Says About You. And it looks pretty bungled to me.
It’s all about noticing differences in job-related behavior that (supposedly) correlate with the use of different web browsers. Grant didn’t do that research, but he presents an analysis that, like so many TED talks in recent years, is mostly bullshit.
Among his points is that “Firefox and Chrome users [are] more committed and better performers on every metric.” That’s as compared to Safari, and, I kid you not, Internet Explorer users. Internet Explorer was once the default browser built into Microsoft Windows, but not anymore. Not anymore for a long time, in fact; Microsoft stopped adding any new features to it in 2016.
So point one is that either the research is at least a decade old, or the research population tends to be given obsolete computers to work on. So who is this population that Grant is using to make sweeping generalizations about us all? It’s customer service agents.
Making sweeping generalizations based on bungled interpretations seems to be what the majority of TED talks are all about now. It’s all about the “wow factor” and, I suppose, adding another routine checkoff item to your LinkedIn profile. That’s not how TED began, but oh well. We live in a Clickbait world now.
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