The Art of Insight

Chapter 11Making Data Friendly

with Alli Torban

Figure 11.1: “An Illustrated Guide to Data Literacy: Base Rate Fallacy”

Alli Torban / Data Literacy / https://dataliteracy.com/an-illustrated-guide-to-data-literacy-base-rate-fallacy/ / last accessed under April 19, 2023

One is educated not merely because of what one knows, but as much or more for the manner in which one learns.

—Timothy Fuller

A couple of years ago, my mother phoned me to share her alarm at the large number of vaccinated people being hospitalized for COVID‐19 in Spain, where she lives. That number was increasing, so she wondered whether vaccines and boosters were working as they were supposed to.

Alli Torban's data literacy comics brought back memories of that conversation. One of them in particular, about base rate fallacies (Figure 11.1,) would have come in handy. Vaccination rates in Spain have been high since COVID vaccines became available. However, even if you're vaccinated there's a chance that you'll get the disease and develop complications. When the number of people who get vaccinated increases and eventually becomes a substantial majority, more of them will end up in the emergency room; this might fool us into thinking that there's something strange going on.

Alli works for Data Literacy, a company founded by Ben Jones, who has written several books about data science and visualization. Like Allen ...