Three reasons to be cautious when reading data-driven “explanations”

Photo by Sunder Muthukumaran on Unsplash
Did you know that fairly often, there will be multiple extremely different stories you can tell about identical data, none of which are false? In other words, the mapping from statistical results to true stories about those results is not unique. This leads to a lot of confusion, and it also implies that claims about "the reason" behind a complex social phenomenon should be interpreted with caution. Here are 3 common situations of this happening, each illustrated with realistic political ...
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