All this suggests that one cure for conformity is to make decisions with a diverse group of people, people who are likely to bring different ideas and assumptions to the table.

But bigger isn’t always better. It’s perfectly possible to reach vast numbers of people while still missing out on enough other people to get a disastrously skewed impression of what’s really going on.

A good chart isn’t an illustration but a visual argument,” declares Alberto Cairo near the beginning of his book How Charts Lie.

superforecasting means being willing to change your mind.

Doubt is also easy to sell because it is a part of the process of scientific exploration and debate.

by organizing and presenting the data, we are inviting people to draw certain conclusions. And just as a verbal argument can be logical or emotional, sharp or woolly, clear or baffling, honest or misleading, so too can the argument made by a chart.

As our communication, leisure, and commerce are moving to the internet, and the internet is moving into our phones, our cars, and even our spectacles, life can be recorded and quantified in a way that would have been hard to imagine just a decade ago.

just as the most brilliant thinkers of the age failed to make progress while practicing in secret, secret algorithms based on secret data are likely to lead to missed opportunities for improvement.

the problem is not the algorithms, or the big datasets. The problem is a lack of scrutiny, transparency, and debate.