The modern illiterate is the person who can read thousands of sentences and still cannot tell what any of them are worth.
Modern literacy now means understanding information. Specifically: knowing what a number measures, what it leaves out, what evidence supports a claim, what comparison is legitimate or where one conclusion ends and another begins.
Information arrives faster than judgment.
Everywhere, numbers and claims are presented to us as conclusions. And the person who cannot interrogate them eventually hands that authority to somebody who can.
To make a rational choice, you need competing pieces of evidence and an understanding of what each source is actually capable of telling you.
A manager who cannot read a survey can mistake the loudest complaint for the dominant problem. It doesn’t make them illiterate in the traditional sense since they are perfectly capable of reading the report. It does make them information-illiterate because the report is making decisions for them.
Data Shows What Happened Without Explaining Why
Before asking what the data says, ask what the data can say.
Your sales chart can tell you that sales changed. It cannot, by itself, tell you why. As elementary as it sounds, much of modern business culture demonstrates that it is not.
We routinely turn measurements into explanations. We see a business that hired more people and subsequently grew and conclude that hiring produced the growth.
Correlation is seductive because it looks like causation with the difficult part removed.
But business decisions are made in the difficult part. Maybe two variables moved together because a third variable moved both of them.
You have to keep practicing the willingness to ask what relationship actually exists between things rather than accepting the most convenient story.
Understanding Data Is a Form of Agency
Why should you?
Because data is never the whole territory. It is a measurement taken from a particular angle.
A high conversion rate does not tell you whether the people converting are worth acquiring, does it? One piece of information is almost never the final answer; only a piece of evidence.
Numbers carry an undeserved aura of neutrality. Put a percentage on a slide and people relax. But numbers do not remove interpretation.
Someone decided what to measure and which comparison belonged on that slide. Before you even see the number, choices have already been made.
To be literate today means consciously engaging with these choices.
If you cannot understand the information governing a decision, someone else will have to be the interpreter. And once someone else is the interpreter, they acquire influence over the decision itself.
When you understand the evidence behind a decision, you participate in the decision. When you do not, the decision happens to you.
Reading the data gives you access to information. Understanding it gives you agency over it.
We should stop pretending those are the same thing.
Things on my Desk
The inspiration behind this post, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. 30+ years of getting books to kids. 🥹📚
Dolly said literacy, access and big dreams.
From the Same Desk
- Productivity must belong to the producer. A software company does not charge less because its engineers improved deployment.
- If a business repeatedly wastes resources, customers leave. Few other institutions face consequences this immediate.
- Fast fashion is being financially repackaged. The Vinted app and its cousins have built a secondary market that lets consumers keep buying the same volume with a cleaner conscience.
- A technology can be powerful without being universally useful. The rhetoric surrounding AI deserves more suspicion than the technology itself.