In looking at figures from the past, we behave, as Vance and Alexander suggest, rather like admissions officers at elite colleges and universities: We look for ways to send them to the reject pile. And we do this for exactly the same reason that college admissions officers do. We are overwhelmed by data, we are continually at the mercy of a fire hose of information, and anything we can do to limit the amount of data that we have to deal with, we do.
