It’s not difficult to develop an incorrect theory. Ice cream and spaghetti have more letters than tofu and celery, so therefore, foods with long names are more fattening than those with short ones.
If you start moving forward with this theory, you’ll soon find outliers. Sugar only has five letters, and watercress has ten. If we want to stick with our theory, we’ll have to come up with more and more complex reasons why we ignore some of the data and embrace the rest.
Of course, this is absurd.
And yet we do it all the time. Ornate explanations about the stock market, SEO or politics. Charts and graphs where we spend most of our time fitting a plot to a few dots, or amplifying the obscure to justify the theory.
A simple theory that matches the data is much more likely to accurately explain causation. It might not be a comfortable theory, or one that matches our trajectory, but it’s a better theory.
It turns out that the number of letters is completely irrelevant to how fattening a food is. I’m sorry you spent all this time on research, but you’re on the wrong path.
If you want to know why your marketing, your investments or your arguments are floundering, it might pay to reconsider the theory, not look for more data to justify the current one.
