These developments have come with a cost, which is that the problem that you face in investing now is not that you don’t have enough data but that you have too much, often pulling you in different directions. One of the ironic consequences of this data overload is that, as behavioral economists have established conclusively, our decision making has become even more simplistic and irrational because we have all this data at our disposal. Another irony is that as numbers come to dominate so many business discussions, people are trusting them less, not more, and falling back on stories.
