Book Review

May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans

Why do intelligent people believe things that aren't true?

I read May Contain Lies by Alex Edmans during my Puja holidays.

Edmans teaches finance at London Business School, and his question is simple: why do intelligent people believe things that aren't true? His answer is uncomfortable. It's rarely because we lack information. It's because we believe what we want to believe, and we like clean answers. "X always works" feels better than "X works sometimes, for some people."

The part that stuck with me is what he calls the Ladder of Misinference. A statement isn't automatically a fact. A fact isn't data, because one case may not represent the rest. Data isn't evidence, because a pattern doesn't establish a cause. And evidence isn't proof, because something true in one setting may not hold in another. It sounds obvious written down, but he shows how often we skip steps, from the wellness influencer Belle Gibson, who claimed she'd beaten cancer with diet, to the famous "10,000 hours" rule that grew far beyond the study it came from.

Reading it, I kept thinking about my own work in molecular simulations, where we learn to be suspicious of our own results. Edmans asks us to bring that same suspicion to newspapers, reports, and yes, research papers, especially the ones that confirm what we already think.

Though most of the examples come from business and from the US and UK, the book is clear, fair, and never lectures you.