Always Check The Data Source

Wikipedia can get it wrong. People can get it wrong too.

I have recently read the article “18 Lessons of Quarantine Urbanism” by Benjamin H. Bratton, Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego, and Professor at European Graduate School and Visiting Professor at NYU Shanghai and the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

As long as the title of Bratton’s article is self-explanatory, I won’t go deep into the topic about the future of the post-pandemic world. Still, I’d like to share a short story about the words in this article which have particularly drawn my attention:

“Spanning the globe, the Kübler-Ross stages of grief are the new national horoscope: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. To say that the USA is ten days behind Italy is not only an epidemiological analysis; it is a psychiatric diagnosis”.

To get an idea about the five stages of grief by Kübler-Ross you can watch this funny cartoon:

I was so amazed by an idea that the attitude of the nation to COVID-19 can be measured by the stages of grief that I immediately shared the link to this article to a WhatsApp chat with my family which is spread all around the globe.

My sister told me that the order of the stages of grief by Kübler-Ross had been messed up in this article. The sister’s guess was based on a data viz from the English version of Wikipedia:

Data Viz of Stages of Grief in Wikipedia

I wondered whether the English version of Wikipedia got it wrong. So, I googled the book by Kübler-Ross to check the data source, and the stages of grief in the book were the same as in Bratton’s article.

I was so excited that I had found a mistake in Wikipedia that I tried to report about the mistake to Wikipedia (the first time in my life!) and, when searching for how I could do it, I found a long list of the pending reports on the same topic:

This list made me think that I did discovered the correct order of the stages of grief, and I started telling my family and friends (basically everyone) about my findings.

I was very proud of myself. I recommended everyone to always check the data source and kept telling people words like “This is so important nowadays!” and so on…

It wasn’t until one of my friends toned me down by saying that she had heard that the order of the stages of grief was not valid as people in grief could skip some of them or to return back to another stage after going through it once.

That was the moment I rushed to really check the data source and read the book “On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages” by Kübler-Ross… It turned out that back in 1969 Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross way smarter than me in picking up words.

Besides stating that there are 5 stages of grief and no more, the researcher didn’t even made a numbered list out of the 5 stages of grief to show the idea that there is no prescribed order:

Screenshot from the book “On Grief and Grieving…” by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

With the rise of infodemiology and tales around the virus, it is so important nowadays to fight one’s cognitive biases. So, here are my 5 stages of getting it all wrong:

1. By stating that the US is “ten days behind Italy” Professor Benjamin H. Bratton has never stated that the stages of grief have any prescribed order — It was totally my idea. My interpretation of one’s words.
2. I thought that the noble professor couldn’t get it wrong — We tend to trust the people of science, however their words can be totally messed up by the media or by our restless and very creative minds (like in my case). So, I didn’t placed my interpretation of Bratton’s words in doubt and shared it with others without checking if the stages of grief had some order.
3. I thought that Wikipedia couldn’t get it wrong — And I was shocked to learn that it actually could. If there is something is to blame Wikipedia for, it is that there was no label that the data viz with the stages of grief is one of the possible interpretations. Besides, visualizing something which has no linear order with a linear graph is not a good idea at all.
4. I thought that scanning the data source (the book by Kübler-Ross in this story) is enough to make some conclusions — However, the first time I had googled the book, I was so eager to find the confirmation for my interpretation of Bratton’s words that I wasn’t reading carefully.
5. I did continue to spread the misinformation but now I also bragged that I had googled the data source — We hardly even place in doubt the words of someone who is referring to some primary data source. We are too lazy to go check the data source ourselves.

By saying this I would like to repeat my thought (which I happened to get wrong myself):

Always check the data source!