In Jake’s Thing, Kingsley Amis gave it a name: he called it ‘the inverted pyramid of piss’: ‘One of [Geoffrey Mabbott’s] specialities was the inverted pyramid of piss, a great parcel of attitudes, rules and catchwords resting on one tiny (if you looked long and hard enough) point. Thus it was established beyond any real doubt that his settled antipathy to all things Indian, from books and films about the Raj, to Mrs Gandhi… was rooted in Alcestis’s second husband’s mild fondness for curries.’
It’s high time this phrase was revived, because piss pyramids are everywhere. We assumed more data would help humanity settle its differences: in reality it often exacerbates them. With ever more data, it becomes far easier, even without conscious intent, to find evidence to support your preconceptions. Or to take a meaningless small correlation and build a whole urinary edifice on top.
The truth is that real-world data is almost always messy and contradictory – like life
To be clear, this is what a robust statistical finding looks like. In Doll and Hill’s studies into smoking, after the first ten years of follow-up they reported 4,597 deaths and described an association between cigarettes and lung cancer. The annual death rate was 0.07 per 1,000 in non-smokers and 3.15 per 1,000 in men smoking 35 or more cigarettes per day.
Now it’s safe to say they were on to something. It’s 0.07 vs 3.15. That’s a 4,400 per cent increase. Yet in the world of narratives there is little distinction made between clear-cut findings such as this and those which show that, ‘after correcting for lifestyle factors’, eating bacon may elevate the risk of X in older Latino women by up to 8 per cent. The facts are different; the story sounds much the same.
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