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What We’re Reading

January 04, 2017

Data-ness

Some years ago, Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness,” something that has the aura of truth because it just feels like the truth.

When it comes to making a point, numbers have a special appeal, no doubt because they appear to offer objective neutrality. But the accumulation of numbers, the use of data, often merely approximates truth, offering “data-ness” as the numerical equivalence of truthiness.