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Data Literacy

For professionals who need to understand data, statistics, and evidence without being statisticians. Each article unpacks a real case — a famous paradox, a misleading aggregate, a result that fooled experts — and the analytical mistake behind it, so you can spot it in your own work.

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Data Literacy

The Protective Effect That Wasn't There

4 min read

Hospital records seemed to show diabetes protecting patients from gallbladder disease. The correlation was never real — it was manufactured by the simple fact that everyone in the data had already been admitted. A case study in Berkson's Paradox, and why a sample built by selection isn't safe to read at face value.

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Data Literacy

The Tallest Parents Never Had the Tallest Children

4 min read

In 1886, Francis Galton compared thousands of parents' and children's heights and found the pattern he'd first spotted in sweet peas: every extreme pulled back toward average, generation after generation. A real case study in regression to the mean, and why picking the worst (or best) score to intervene on can make almost anything look like it worked.

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Data Literacy

The Correlation That Was Positive for States and Negative for People

4 min read

In 1950, a sociologist found that immigrants and literacy correlated positively across U.S. states and negatively across individual people — the same census, the same year, opposite signs. A real case study in the ecological fallacy, and why a group-level number can't answer a question about the people inside it.

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Data Literacy

The Survival Rates That Improved While No One Got Better

4 min read

In 1985, lung cancer survival statistics rose in every single stage of the disease — without a single patient living longer. A real case study in the Will Rogers phenomenon, and why a rising average can hide the fact that nothing actually changed.

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Data Literacy

The Data Audit Checklist to Run Before You Start Analyzing

2 min read

Most analysis problems that look like modeling problems are actually data problems nobody checked for first. A short audit up front catches most of them before they cost you time.

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Data Literacy

The Dead Salmon That Read Minds

4 min read

A dead fish, put in a brain scanner, appeared to respond to photos of people with statistically significant brain activity. It was a joke with a serious point — about what happens when you run thousands of tests at once and only report the ones that worked.

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Data Literacy

The Test Result That Fooled the Doctors

4 min read

Give a room full of physicians a positive screening test and one prevalence number, and most will badly overestimate the odds the patient is actually sick. A short primer on base-rate neglect, and why 'accurate' tests aren't the same as trustworthy results.

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Data Literacy

The Plane That Never Made It Back

4 min read

The Air Force wanted to armor the parts of returning bombers riddled with bullet holes. A statistician told them to armor the parts that had none. A short primer on survivorship bias, and why the data you don't have can matter more than the data you do.

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Data Literacy

The Bias That Disappeared When You Looked Closer

3 min read

Berkeley's 1973 admissions numbers looked like textbook discrimination against women — until anyone checked department by department. A short primer on Simpson's Paradox, and why the number you aggregate is a choice, not a neutral fact.

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Data Literacy

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