#236 Seeing Beyond Data that May Contain Lies | Alex Edmans, PhD

There’s an ancient story of multiple blind men touching an elephant on different parts of its body. And each man emphatically states what the elephant is based on the body part. The guy touching the leg says the elephant is a tree trunk. The guy touching the ear says it’s a huge pancake. The guy at the tail says it’s a rope, and so on… Like the elephant parable demonstrates, finding reliable, truthful information can be—to put it mildly—a huge challenge. Oftentimes, we’ll hear a story from one source and another source will contradict it. It can feel overwhelming to figure out what’s what. A person who may be able to help us is Dr. Alex Edmans (https://alexedmans.com/), Professor of Finance at London Business School and author of a book I loved called May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about It. The book received praise from scientific journals, the media, and thought leaders like Dr. Kim Milkman, a well-known professor at Wharton, who said it was “required reading.”Alex shares how we can think like scientists. He has strategies to help us find our way through the mire of contradicting data, find our way out of our own biases and cognitive distortions, and find our way into more accurate information.  So, listen in as Alex helps us figure out what we can do to see that elephant more accurately.