Outline for Georgetown Business Class
- Who I am
- Journalist's Best friends: SKEPTICISM AND PARANOIA
- They're here to keep you from making mistakes
- SKEPTICISM - is this data really correct?
- PARANOIA - am I going to destroy my reputation?
- Let's relate this to data visualization
- Bad studies
- Data
- Correlation is NOT causation
- Yet we report it [strokes caused by lack of sleep and too much sleep?]
- Hidden Variables and Random Chance
- Statistical Methods Have Weaknesses
- Averages obscure skew in populations
- Smaller populations often have greater variance.
- Cross-examine Your Proxies
- Example of GDP as an established proxy for wealth
- Pornhub's bad proxy for Dem/GOP states
- Movoto's Stress Index
- Try To Start With The Question, Not The Data
- Inductive vs. Abductive Reasoning
- Does the Data you have match the question you want to ask?
- Correlation is NOT causation
- Maps