The Data Detective

And Big Data does not eliminate the need for all the other ways humans have developed over the millennia to understand the world.

We are often wrong, in other words, about how the world works when we rely just on what we hear or personally experience. While the methodology of good data science is often intuitive, the results are frequently counterintuitive.

How is it even possible to maintain a data-driven approach to a world that simply does not make sense?

This is the future of work skill, which no one wants to talk about: Knowing when to look beyond the data, because only human intuition, leaps of logic, and sense-making can come to ‘an’ answer. (Note: Not ‘the’ answer... that’s another trapping of

As an empirical matter, we all have beliefs and biases, forged from some combination of our experiences, our values, our knowledge, and perhaps our political or professional agenda. One of the nice characteristics of the Bayesian perspective is that, in explicitly acknowledging that we have prior beliefs that affect how we interpret new evidence, i