I'm back after a very long hiatus. I've been doing a lot of analytics lately that ended up going against expected results, and it got me thinking about how people form ideas and hold onto them, and how that can be overcome. A few weeks ago

Happy August to my august readers! The dog days of summer are here, and with them has come a long lull in news I care a ton about and have a lot to talk about. I’m also firmly in the middle of year one rearing an infant, and boy

We recently had our family car stolen, so I’ve got cars on my mind (that’s also why I’ve been far away from the blog for a few weeks). Everything is fine, thankfully, because insurance was functional (though certainly not helpful), but I am thinking about cars, the

It's been a few weeks again, I am still in caretaker mode with our first kid. Much respect to the people that spend their time being primary caretakers and also workers, it is so hard to shift mindset from diapers and bottles and enrichment to analytical thinking. Today

A couple weeks ago it was reported that Nate Silver is out at FiveThirtyEight, the brand he expanded massively on his “perfect” prediction of the 2012 election outcome in all 50 states. I want to talk about Nate Silver, because to me he’s a great example of a data

A quick note for email subscribers: ghost newsletters were having some problems rendering in gmail last week. I know mine was missing images. Based on what I've seen in some of my other subscriptions this week, the issue is fixed, but if there are rendering problems just link

Some housekeeping: last week I had hammered out a blog on bad uses of data, but I reverted it to draft. I stand by what I said in it, but it was incomplete and some of the arguments weren’t given enough words. I’m going to try to parse

Last week I saw a tweet that made me recall a Coast Guard unit I’d heard about years ago, and haven’t thought about much since. The location of the station was bad, but it was a bad station for a lot of reasons unrelated to location. It made

In recent weeks, two major tech topics have come to the forefront, both in some ways tied to US-China relations. The first is new regulation, aimed at TikTok, due to the behavior of the TikTok “algorithm” and the perceived ties between TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and the Chinese government.

I was going to hold off on publishing this until later this week, but recent events made it feel somewhat relevant. I can’t stop thinking about this article in the financial times. It’s a fascinating example of how we develop myths that help instill pride in our collective