“Courses in “data science” are proliferating in our universities, and jobs for “data scientists” are lucrative in the companies that participate in the “data economy.” But I hope with this book to convince you that data are profoundly dumb. Data can tell you that the people who took a medicine recovered faster than those who did not take it, but they can’t tell you why. Maybe those who took the medicine did so because they could afford it and would have recovered just as fast without it.”