Data before Decisions…

I have been reading the book “A Field Guide to Lies” by Daniel Levitin.  Critical Thinking principles for the information age.  Some of the discussions about statistics and probability is fundamental but really who does not need a refresher.  The underling principle is that with the amount of information and the access to information being so easy; it is easy to see that many people will try to bend or present “facts” or “news” in ways to make you believe them.

I find that this book really does provide a refresher for many of us in understanding how information is presented and that even professionals ( doctors, journalist, politicians ) can be duped easily. 

Take conditional probability: we have seen again and again that people don’t apply it’s principle properly or even at all in making decisions and therefore have made devising decisions on the general population or even in war.

So the point of this is that in order to make a decision today you have to have a way of reducing the “noise” and to implement correct models to analyze information: either data or news or any type of information. 

And now with the ability of technology to understand and analyze all types of information and to apply the proper analytics method; people will be able to make better informed decisions.

I raise this issue since we seem to living in a time with so much false information or skewed organizations biasing the information to make people make wrong or misinformed decisions.

Thoughts ?