i love that comparison, because you're exactly right. People just take these numbers for granted without actually understanding them. There are somethings in understanding numbers that are just hard for some people. I'll take myself personally. A probability is hard for me. So if i flip a coin three times in a row and it comes up heads those three times, i actually suspect that it will likely come up heads again. It's a legitimate fan goon. And so i guess, is there something we have to do in terms of education or learning for ourselves just a little bit more about how numbers work?
“We have to make data emotional because emotions are what drive us to act,” says Chip Heath, a professor of organizational behavior and author of the new book, Making Numbers Count: The Art of Science of Communicating Numbers. In this interview with podcast host Matt Abrahams, Heath talks about ways that data and statistics can be used to illuminate — or obscure — our message. “A lot of people in the world don’t understand numbers like the numbers people,” he says. “And there are a lot of untranslated numbers that float around in organizations and in society.”
Heath suggests thinking about numbers like a foreign language we need to “translate” for our audience: “If we don’t translate numbers into something that’s more tangible, we’re going to sacrifice in a big way.“
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