Data has an annoying way of conforming itself to support whatever point of view we want it to support. In fact, Nate Silver, a well-known statistician and founder of the New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight (it was acquired by ESPN in 2013), noted, “The most calamitous failures of prediction usually have a lot in common. We focus on those signals that tell a story about the world as we would like it to be, not how it really is.”8 We don’t realize this, we don’t mean for it to happen, but it is an unfortunate frailty of the human brain.
