Big Data Can be Bad Data (Michael E. Smith): Putting math in it does not make it science if the numbers were made

Kaiser Josef Wrote Don Giovanni Syndrome (Phil Paine): we often give rulers credit for things that just happened when they were alive. If you asked the oligarchs of any declining place, they will tell you that they and their ancestors were the source of all wealth and creativity, when in fact the elites took over as the growth and newness were

Easiest Person to Fool: its yourself!

Vi Hart’s Internet Votes (written 2015, published 2017):

On the internet, content rises to the top if it wins the popular vote. But unlike modern implementations of democracy, you get as many votes as you have time to give, all day every day, and most of those votes are taken by web companies without asking. And unlike the popular vote in democracy,

Incorrect Premises: many people’s beliefs about the past are rooted in false assumptions, such as assuming that riding a horse was as convenient as driving a car or of course there were nonpartisan, impersonal courts following formal procedures with jurisdiction over everyone or obviously everyone was either superstitious and ignorant or a liberal

Telephone, Game of: as stories are retold or texts are copied they change.

Defensiveness: its embarrassing to be wrong in public, so once you have publicly committed to a position its hard to change your mind.

Partisanship: many people much of the time are more interested in supporting their faction than finding the truth. Many of the customs of science were created to keep debates from becoming dominated by parties outside of science, but parties within science can emerge (eg. debates about the Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain).

Anecdote: its wise not to trust them unless you have checked an original source. All too often the story that you use to represent a situation in miniature was made up by a journalist in 1928 or an opera writer in 1782. See Friedman’s Law of Anecdotes for more details.