Data is confidence

Let’s say I asked you how confident you were that you could drive from your house to the airport in under two hours. (Yes, it’s the same question I posed in Monday’s Everything is a bet email.)

There’s one very important factor in deciding your confidence level, which you might not even have thought about because it’s so obvious: having some clue about the typical drive time.

• Have you ever actually made the drive?

• If not, have you checked the drive time in your maps app?

• Or, do you even know roughly how far the airport is?

If those answers are all “no,” it’ll be very hard to claim you’re at all confident about the drive time.

The good news is, you can dramatically increase your confidence very easily: just turn any of those “noes” into “yeses.”

Here’s the thing:

When you have little-to-no data, you should have little-to-no confidence.

By adding even a small bit of data — even rough estimates — you can significantly increase your reasonable level of confidence.

And, the bonus question:

Of the three yes/no questions above, which one do you think is the easiest to turn from “no” to “yes”?

Probably, it’s “checking your maps app.” You don’t actually have to make the drive yourself to find out.

Often there’s an easy and good-enough way to close the data gap, so you can get to a confidence level that suits your risk tolerance.

All the best,
A.

P.S. Yes, I checked the correct plural of “no” and “yes.” Yes, it looks funny to me, too. So does the other correct way. C'est la vie.