The Data Detective

I worry about a world in which many people will believe anything, but I worry far more about one in which people believe nothing beyond their own preconceptions.

Wishful thinking isn’t the only form of motivated reasoning, but it is a common one. We believe in part because we want to.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”)

So information is beautiful—but misinformation can be beautiful, too. And producing beautiful misinformation is becoming easier than ever.

As Loewenstein puts it, curiosity starts to glow when there’s a gap “between what we know and what we want to know.”

Sample error reflects the risk that, purely by chance, a randomly chosen sample of opinions does not reflect the true views of the population.

Good statistics don’t just serve government planners; they are valuable to a far wider group of people.

Curiosity breaks the relentless pattern.

when media outlets want to grab our attention, they look for stories that are novel and unexpected over a short time horizon—and these stories are more likely to be bad than good.

Sampling error is when a randomly chosen sample doesn’t reflect the underlying population purely by chance; sampling bias is when the sample isn’t randomly chosen at all.