Commentary

Look past the stats & numbers

August 28, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Jasen Obermeyer

Statistics and numbers don’t lie. But they don’t tell the whole truth.

It seems we rely so heavily on them in today’s world. And that’s a shameful obsession.

Stats and numbers can be beneficial; they help provide clarity in decision-making, can be measured, simplify complex problems, and turn intangible concepts into tangible ones, especially when working with others.

But the problem with just following stats and numbers constantly is it can lead to an incomplete picture, can be misleading, or you’re focusing only on a small aspect instead of the whole picture.

For example, companies love their quarterly reports and need to be shown as profitable/healthy to shareholders. Well, if the company isn’t doing that well, they’ll find ways to present themselves as strong. And how do they do that? Well, one way, if you pay attention, is laying off staff. The less people to pay, the more money the company generates. And I’ve noticed in big tech companies, the layoffs happen around the same time as the quarterly reports, to boost the company’s profits.

So in this case, the stats and numbers have been manipulated.

Or when the government announces a certain number of new jobs created, they aren’t talking about the jobs lost, so instead, it’s two steps forward, one step back. And what jobs were created? Full-time work? Part-time? Freelance? Contract? They don’t say because then the stats and numbers can be skewed and misleading.

Stats and numbers can help make sense of a situation, but aren’t the solution. If you get sucked into it and follow it constantly, you rely on it, and it becomes a detrimental crutch on the situation, creating a worse problem than before, instead of a solution.

Look at the strategy of body count in the Vietnam War. The decision to focus on the number of dead Vietnamese compared to Americans – and how many weapons were seized/destroyed – really left a blurry overall strategy for warfare and victory. It became very difficult to measure success. And this led to inflated and falsified body count, in particular civilians killed in the free-fire zone, who weren’t combatants.

Looking at numbers in warfare must be draining, and without a clear strategy for victory, demoralizing. This constant report of body count was being fed daily to the American people, and while the body count of the Vietnamese was higher than Americans, it didn’t matter. Instead of focusing on something they can see, battles that saw an area secured or a base destroyed, they followed the numbers. Impossible to fully comprehend, and soon led to demoralization. And ultimately, your country’s citizens only care about their one dead serviceman, not the 10 dead enemies.

What a bloody, violent mess that ended up being an unwinnable situation and a divisive time. Quantifying numbers in warfare is very difficult, which doesn’t offer room for permanent victory. And leads to even brutal warfare, where man is more of a monster, a perfect, emotionless killing machine. As Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin supposedly said, “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.”

Sometimes you have to ignore the numbers and concentrate on the people. The human element. Politicians who rely entirely on political polls only see what they want to see, not the whole picture. Election results aren’t painting the full picture. And they only use one colour to do that. They aren’t polled from every single citizen, so are you really popular or unpopular? What is it that you are liked or disliked about?

Statistics and numbers provide mainly surface-level information and short-term solutions. You need to dig deeper, find that emotional human element that offers far greater insight, if that statistic has any real weight or meaning to it.

The stats and numbers simply give the numerical answers, not the human ones. You need to interpret their meaning and importance. They still require a human touch to them. Instead of just using numbers, use words as well, language, to better describe the problem and solution.

If all you see are numbers, then it’s going to have unintended consequences. If you’re following an algorithm, especially trends in the entertainment business, it’s going to come back and bite you in the butt. You keep following it, and you’ll miss everything around you. You become incapable of adapting to your surroundings. Long-term, stable solutions paired with short-term ones are best to handle things.

Stats and numbers constantly change, so you must as well.

Who doesn’t love stats and numbers? While helpful, they are simply just one tool to use, not the only one. Not every scenario needs them, and not every scenario should be beholden to them. There are things we just can’t quantify. We’re humans; we’re very complex living beings that aren’t machines and require more than a pie chart or spreadsheet to understand and interact with.

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