Data Literacy

Role

Data is the currency of modern decision-making across every domain — medicine, policy, business, science, journalism — and data illiteracy is its most exploited vulnerability. The majority of people cannot reliably distinguish between correlation and causation in a presented finding, cannot recognize when a chart's y-axis is manipulated to exaggerate a trend, cannot evaluate whether a sample size supports a stated conclusion, and cannot assess whether statistical significance translates into any practical effect worth acting on. This is not a marginal problem: it means that most people are making consequential decisions — health choices, investment decisions, political positions, business strategies — from quantitative evidence they cannot accurately evaluate, in an information environment full of deliberately misleading data presentations by parties with strong incentives to produce them.