people lie—to friends, to surveys, and to themselves—to make themselves look better. But the world also lies to us by presenting us with faulty, misleading data. The world shows us a huge number of successful Harvard graduates but fewer successful Penn State graduates, and we assume that there is a huge advantage to going to Harvard. By cleverly making sense of nature’s experiments, we can correctly make sense of the world’s data—to find what’s really useful and what is not.
