This is a great article. It's why I roll my eyes when someone asks "Show me the data" or the classic "Sources please."

Unless we're literally having a debate about raw statistics, the data likely adds nothing to either side of the debate; because the data is not answering any actual questions and you can draw opposite conclusions from the same data. Just because the data appears to fit nicely to a particular mainstream narrative, that doesn't make the narrative true because one could come up with an infinite number of different narratives which provide a better fit for the data...

Which narrative is more likely to be right? The one narrative which you happen to have inside your head or the infinite number of other possible narratives which you haven't even heard of?

My experience is that the mainstream narrative is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator amongst the masses... Which nowadays are made up of a lot of highly educated people... But the narrative is nonetheless simplistic. There are many people out there who have had exposure to enough different data points in their lives that the mainstream narratives don't make sense to them.

Your understanding of the world is narratives + data. When you say that you make decisions "entirely based on data," you're missing some crucial aspect because you're almost certainly using a narrative to fill in the many gaps in the data.

Not to mention that many correlations are self-reinforcing feedback cycles without clear causality.

The very idea that causality is always simple and unidirectional is itself a narrative... And I would argue an incorrect one! Yet many scientific fields are founded on this narrative!

In my experience, I can't recall reading a single paper in the social sciences describing causality as "likely a self-reinforcing feedback cycle" - Even this language sounds unscientific. They're always trying to prove causality. It seems like nobody ever tries to prove "Likely a feedback cycle" because nobody likes these ambiguous answers.

I suspect this is because science almost always has a financial goal behind it and people want definite answers. They want to be able to use the data to craft a narrative like "No, drug X definitely doesn't cause condition Y."

> This is a great article. It's why I roll my eyes when someone asks "Show me the data" or the classic "Sources please."

That doesn't follow. Yes, there are going to be multiple interpretations of the data, however the data must exist otherwise you're just pulling claims out of thin air.

Being asked to provide the data is just an easy filter for people who just say things, who only have the narrative, like "the earth is a flat disc" - okay, show me some experimental data that would show this to be true.