The Tyranny of Spreadsheets

June 27, 2021

Tim Harford has a fantasic essay entitled The Tyranny of Spreadsheets, where he discusses the time 16,000 positive Covid cases disappeared from the UK’s contract tracing system. And while the incident stemmed from researchers’ use of Microsoft Excel, he covers a wide range of topics: from the birth of computerized spreadsheets to battling smallpox in Nigeria via ring vaccination, to the bookkeping practices of 14th Century Italian textile merchants.

When used by a trained accountant to carry out double-entry bookkeeping, a long-established system with inbuilt error detection, Excel is a perfectly professional tool. But when pressed into service by genetics researchers or contact tracers, it’s like using your Swiss Army Knife to fit a kitchen because it’s the tool you have closest at hand. Not impossible but hardly advisable.

Harford moves around topics with ease, and the whole essay reads to me like a well-written poem. Surprising leaps that reveal their interconnectedness after the landing, and a growing pleasure at experiencing all these disparate things merging together.

[via MetaFilter, photo via Mika Baumeister]

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