Data Will Lead Us Astray

Piet Hein, the great Danish inventor, designer, artist, mathematician, and philosopher, struck a chord with me the other day while I was reading Peter Borberg’s biography of him.

Hein recounted how Hans Christian Andersen was a frequent visitor to the home of his grandmother, Ida Wulff, when she was just a child. Andersen had even told her that the fairy tale The Little Ida’s Flowers was written about her. The Hans Christian Andersen Museum, however, attributes the story to a different Ida, the daughter of folklorist J.M. Thiele. A flower display in a Doll’s bed passed down in the Thiele family for generations was even installed next to her in a previous exhibition to connect fairy tale and biographical life.

Piet Hein wryly dismissed his grandmother’s claim:

“He probably told that to all the girls named Ida.”

Hein, in all his cynicism, was onto something. Just because Hans Christian Andersen said it was so doesn’t make it an absolute truth. And when a claim flatters its listener, it deserves an extra beat of skepticism. Not because it is necessarily false, but because it is socially useful.

Andersen worked tirelessly to bridge the divide between himself and the Copenhagen bourgeoisie. He would not shy away from extreme flattery, pleading, or anything else that would help him get a foot in the door and away from his proletarian past. It fits his psychology well that he would use his literature to forge connections, secure goodwill, or simply please listeners by giving them an important role in the story. Looking only at the dedication and the anecdote itself, we see “Andersen the grateful.” But looking at the context, we might instead see a strategic networker who knew which buttons to press.

This phenomenon is known as survivorship bias. A classic example dates back to World War II, when researchers examined bombers that returned home with damage. They looked at where the bullet holes were located and concluded that those specific areas should be reinforced. But the statistician Abraham Wald discovered the fatal flaw: they were only looking at the planes that survived. The holes represented something entirely different from what first glance suggested. They were indications that these were the places where planes could get hit and still make it back. It was all those places without bullet holes that were fatally fragile.

We often make the same mistake when presented with data, especially when it is historical and so much of the context has disappeared into the fog of time.

You could see the same logic in something as humble as a recorder. The wooden instruments that survive into our collections are often not the ones that shaped the soundscapes of our past. They are the ones that escaped hands, breath, moisture, repairs, and accidents. The most played instruments are precisely the ones most likely to be altered, worn down, patched, and eventually discarded. What remains for us to measure and model, then, is not “the typical recorder,” but the unusually preserved recorder: the one that was kept safe, kept still, kept away. And from that stillness we try to reconstruct exactly what it was not: liveliness. We deduct sound from silence. Our archives are full of objects that survived because they were spared, while the world was made by things that were used up.

In the Andersen case, what “survives” is not the whole social reality, only the parts that were remembered, recorded, and later repeated or even institutionalized. What falls away are all the similar moments that were never written down, never retold, or never made legible to our present day. We end up building understanding and meaning on what happens to have made it through.

Let’s stay with Andersen for a moment. Take another fairy tale: The Bell. Andersen dedicated this story, about a poor boy and a rich prince who end up in an almost marriage-like scene in nature, to Hereditary Grand Duke Carl Alexander. Later scholars have used it as a piece in a puzzle about Andersen’s sexuality or his deep personal relationships. That may be right. But perhaps it is simply another piece in a much larger picture of social ambition and necessary alliance-building.

Hans Christian Andersen and Carl Alexander?

When we assign too much value to a single piece, we forget to reflect on the image as a whole. We see the fragment but overlook the continuum of contexts that history has erased. Data, whether a 150-year-old letter or a modern user survey, leads us astray precisely because it is, by nature, fragmentary.

Although I would love to use this as a stick to beat bad historians and challenge their often reductive, imagination-starved depictions of reality, this concern applies to us all. When we read a report, a user survey, or any other data-based presentation, we only see the planes that made it back. We see the answers from whoever took the time to respond, or the numbers that are actually measurable.

But what of all the others? What about all the questions we didn’t ask, or the context from which we extracted the numbers?

I am not saying data is bad. But our use of data often is. Without critical, reflective interpretation, data becomes misleading and dangerous. It becomes a false representation of reality that leads us astray. Our job must be to look for the in-betweens and what is left behind: the missing context, the meaning embedded in the framing of the questions that brought the data about in the first place. We cannot simply trust the fragments that have found their way into the light. We need to immerse ourselves in the darkness behind them. The archive, the survey, the report: all indirectly point back to everything that is left out.

Truth, I would argue, resides just as often in the shadows as in what appears before us. It lives in the collective whole that is lost through representation. Our job must be to critically engage with what we see and carefully and compassionately excavate what is hidden behind it.

So perhaps the Hans Christian Andersen Museum needs not just the flower display next to one Ida, but also Piet Hein’s skeptical rejoinder about another: “He probably told that to all the girls named Ida.” Not to dismiss either story, but to hold them in tension – the gratitude and the strategy, the fairy tale and the networker, the fragment and the pattern it hints at. That tension and ambiguity, uncomfortable as it may be, is where understanding actually lives.