Life & Wisdom Quote by Gregg Easterbrook

“Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything” is a neat little indictment disguised as a joke. Easterbrook borrows the moral horror of literal torture to describe a more socially acceptable violence: forcing data to fit a story. The line works because it treats numbers not as cold, authoritative facts but as vulnerable witnesses. Under pressure, they’ll “admit” whatever the interrogator wants. That person might be a pundit hunting a headline, a marketer defending a campaign, a politician polishing a talking point, or a researcher nudging results toward publishable significance.

The intent is less anti-math than anti-certainty. In modern discourse, statistics are often deployed as trump cards: quantified, therefore true. Easterbrook flips that hierarchy. The subtext is that numerical precision can be a costume for dishonesty, and the more complicated the analysis, the easier it becomes to hide coercion behind methodology. “Torture” evokes practices like cherry-picking time windows, redefining categories midstream, excluding inconvenient outliers, p-hacking, overfitting models, or presenting correlation with causal swagger. The confession is the tidy chart that arrives right on cue.

Contextually, this lands in a culture that fetishizes metrics: performance dashboards, “data-driven” management, election polling, A/B testing, and endless rankings. It’s a warning about incentives. When careers, clicks, or funding depend on a clean narrative, the temptation isn’t to ignore data; it’s to rough it up until it talks. Easterbrook’s cynicism is pointed: the problem isn’t that numbers lie, it’s that people are skilled interrogators.