Once you learn to tell the difference, you'll know whom to trust.
A very long time ago, in 2018, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would be ramping up production to 6000 vehicles per week. An anchor for a business program played the video, then addressed their co-host with:
"That's like four full parking structures a week. Wow!"That statement is true for parking structures that have 1500 spots, which most in San Francisco (where the show is produced) don't. Typical numbers here are closer to 500 than 1500. But that's not the important part.
Co-host makes assenting noises.
The important part is that the number was used as a prop, not information.
More precisely, the anchor first bought into the idea that 6000 is a large number for a car company's weekly production, then looked for a way to make that number look big to the show's audience; parking structures are big buildings and are related to cars, so that was a good way to create the perception of "bigness." [1]
In other words, the process of using a number as a prop is:
1. Make a decision based on something other than the number
2. Look for a number to support that decision
3. Choose context to present the number that molds perception in favor of the decision.
The alternative to using numbers as props is using them as information.
The metric '6000 per week' is just data. It becomes information when it answers a question. A few of these questions that come to mind, considering that this is a business program focussing on technology for a mostly finance and finance-adjacent audience would be:
a. How does this production level compare to that of the competitors that Musk repeatedly states he's going to put out of business?
b. How does this production level compare to that of Toyota when it was running the factory that is now Tesla's?
c. How does this production level compare to the demand for electric vehicles in general, possibly by geographical area and brand of vehicle?
Note that these questions extract information from the number 6000, by comparing it to other numbers that are of business interest. This illustrates a very important principle of data-processing for decision-making:
What is informative about data depends on what decision is to be made.
Choosing question a for illustration, and using Wikipedia data for 2016, because it's publicly available so anyone can check this computation without having to pay financial information service fees, here are the production rates for the top 15 car companies by number of vehicles produced:
Those numbers put Tesla's production in context; they suggest that Tesla, relative to the competitors that Musk repeatedly taunts as "dinosaurs" and "on their way out," is a niche player and not a serious business threat. [2]
Note the process for using numbers as information:
1. Determine what decisions are to be informed by the number
2. Find the context that is relevant for that decision
3. Compare number with the numbers from that context
Using numbers as information is important primarily for decision-makers. Realizing when others are using numbers as props, not information, is important for everyone. Especially regarding whether you can trust the numbers -- and the other person.
Just because someone uses numbers as props, that doesn't necessarily mean their intent is to deceive you. Our society, particularly our news and edutainment, are full of prop-use of numbers for non-nefarious reasons: ignorance, desire to connect abstract numbers to concrete objects, laziness.
But there are people whose intent is to deceive, and often you can tell who they are by calling them on their use of numbers as props. [3]
When faced with the above table, many Tesla fans on twitter, some of whom manage third-party money, either resorted to ad hominem ("how big is your short position?" is a common one, even used by Musk) or changing the subject ("these cars will save the planet").
This is how you identify someone who's not making a good-faith mistake of using numbers as props, but rather someone who deliberately avoids using the appropriate context for the numbers to use them as props: they never address the relevant comparison.
Because most people don't process numbers as they hear or read them, but are still influenced by the perceived authority of the number, this behavior (deliberately using numbers as props to deceive, that is) is usually effective as a persuasion tool. And people who deliberately use numbers as props know about that effectiveness and that's why they do it. Which brings us to an important insight about people we get from their use of numbers:
People who deliberately use numbers as props are not to be trusted.
-- -- -- -- FOOTNOTES -- -- -- --
[1] More likely the choice was made by a writer or a producer, not the anchor; but the anchor is the face of the show, so we'll keep referring to them.
[2] Or, if we want to apply strategic thinking, Tesla should build itself by market expansion starting from its niche, instead of a frontal assault on the much larger companies (its current strategy)
[3] For what it's worth, I don't think the anchor, or the TV channel, were trying to deceive their audience. They were just caught in Musk's Reality Distortion Field, which in 2018 was much stronger than Steve Jobs's ever was.
-- -- -- -- ADDENDUM -- -- -- --
Later that year, numbers-as-props sophistry continued unimpeded by any sense of shame on the part of Tesla fans:
