The human mind was made to create patterns. It will see patterns in random data. A turn-of-the-century statistics book put it this way: “Too fine an eye for pattern will find it anywhere.” In other words, you’re going to see more on the chart than is truly there. Also, we don’t look at data neutrally—that is, when the human eye scans a chart, it doesn’t give all data points equal weight. Instead, it will tend to focus on certain outstanding cases, and we tend to form our opinions on the basis of these special cases. It’s human nature to pick out the stunning successes of a method and to
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