I'm a little disappointed in this article. It's a little incoherent and doesn't do a great job of talking about what it means by statistics. It's something about the political power of data collection?
Good for Zeynep publishing this. But I don't really see what the point is. The problem for democracy is that campaigning is about manipulating people to win votes, not about actually engaging in issues. The mass media approaches to this are not particularly less scary to me, even if they are not as effective as new more data-driven approaches.
"In popular mythology, the impressive performances of America’s blacks, especially Owens, so infuriated Hitler that he refused to shake Owens’s hand after his victory in the 100-meter dash. It’s a good story, and one widely disseminated at the time to show that the Olympic spirit had triumphed over Nazi racism. The problem is, it never happened."
Striking editorial by murdered Sri Lankan journalist published posthumously.
