It's a sad truth that our brains are terrible at understanding data. Even worse, they often use random data to deceive us and make us do stupid things – a phenomenon known as cognitive bias. But the Seattle company, Tableau Software, believes it can help people use data to be less stupid. Hard to imagine a technology that could more profoundly affect our daily existence.
In this era of Big Data, we have data about everything. The data, though, is typically packed into hard-to-decode Excel spreadsheets or locked in databases that only experts can read. Tableau wants to change that by giving ordinary people data visualisation software that's as easy to use as Facebook, so we can make more decisions based on data instead of on our instincts, which are mostly terrible.
In a way, this is a new twist on an age-old story of human knowledge. Little by little, data has encroached on our cognitive biases. Depending on who is counting, we have four or five dozen kinds of cognitive biases, including Confirmation Bias (we favour information that confirms our preconceptions) and the Neglect-of-Probability Bias (we hear of a single dramatic event, like a child abduction, believe it's much more common than it really is). In the absence of data, we believe our cognitive biases.
Centuries ago, people looked at the sky and concluded that the Earth was the centre of the universe. Data about the movement of planets, most famously collected by Galileo, eventually eroded that false belief – although cognitive bias was so powerful that, instead of celebrating Galileo for his insight, officials put him under house arrest. Over time, we have collected masses of data and invented tools like computers to make sense of it. Now, thanks to mobile phones and the internet, data is exploding.
Yet it's amazing how relatively little of this data infiltrates our cognitive biases. Tableau's software could change that by sucking data out of complicated spreadsheets and presenting it as interactive pictures: maps and graphs that can reveal trends and patterns with a mouse click or two.
Tableau grew out of PhD research into data visualisation at Stanford University. Nothing quite like it existed before, and a dozen years after Tableau was founded, it's still a work in progress. Tableau's revenues have been doubling about every 18 months, and the company is now worth more than $8bn. And yet, as CEO Christian Chabot tells me: "We probably have reached less than 1% of the people who can benefit from our products. We've barely made a dent so far."
Chabot imagines a world where we check our cognitive biases with data all the time, much the way you look at the GPS map on your smartphone instead of guessing about where you are. Think of all the decisions you now make in a data vacuum. If you have that next whisky, what's the trade-off between how much fun you'll have tonight versus how much you'll suffer in the morning? If you take this job, will you be happy in a year?
One McKinsey study showed that when businesses worked at reducing the effect of cognitive bias in decision making, they achieved returns of up to seven percentage points higher. In sports, the potential impact seems obvious. Moneyball showed how professional baseball was steeped in intuition that turned out to be wrong.
We'll eventually have data that can help with any kind of decision, and it should make us smarter, more logical, more grounded in reality – as a species, less stupid.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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