Ellenberg says the way to avoid falling into Simpson's paradox is to keep multiple views of the data in mind when doing analyses.
Let's say you were in ancient Greece, and you separately observe a drummer on a hill bang a drum before you hear it.
Then on another day you see lightning before you hear thunder.
If you consider each event on its own, a perfectly logical explanation is that there's something unique to drums that slows down the sound from them so it takes longer to reach you, and that lighting and thunder occur at different points in time.
But if you consider the set of both events together, a hypothesis that solves both at the same time is that things you hear take longer to reach you over long distances than things you see.
This was actually one of the examples directly from Lucretius, who in discussing the multiple hypotheses for why lightning and thunder occur at different times tied his suggestion that they occur at the same time but have different travel speeds to his observations of drummers on hills.
It's less specifically Simpson's paradox and more the general value of Ellenberg's analytical advice on avoiding the Simpson's paradox as having been at the root of the success (in hindsight) of one of the wiser philosophy schools in antiquity.
Let's say you were in ancient Greece, and you separately observe a drummer on a hill bang a drum before you hear it.
Then on another day you see lightning before you hear thunder.
If you consider each event on its own, a perfectly logical explanation is that there's something unique to drums that slows down the sound from them so it takes longer to reach you, and that lighting and thunder occur at different points in time.
But if you consider the set of both events together, a hypothesis that solves both at the same time is that things you hear take longer to reach you over long distances than things you see.
This was actually one of the examples directly from Lucretius, who in discussing the multiple hypotheses for why lightning and thunder occur at different times tied his suggestion that they occur at the same time but have different travel speeds to his observations of drummers on hills.
It's less specifically Simpson's paradox and more the general value of Ellenberg's analytical advice on avoiding the Simpson's paradox as having been at the root of the success (in hindsight) of one of the wiser philosophy schools in antiquity.