Statistics
Knowledge may be misleading, so be in your toes!
It’s inevitable that assumptions should be made when coping with any type of information. Knowledge is usually, by it’s very nature, incomplete and imperfect. Regardless, our job is to interpret and extract that means to the perfect of our capacity.
Nonetheless, there’s all the time a threat that dangerous assumptions about information will distort the ultimate consequence to such an extent that the result’s deceptive, and even worse, utterly meaningless.
I might argue that this could occur to each skilled practitioners, in addition to these new to the sector.
However how does this occur? And what may be finished to mitigate it?
Early in my profession I used to be an engineer coping with experimental aerodynamics. That required the processing and interpretation of huge quantities of imperfect experimental information taken from the true world.
There was a really generally used mantra within the workplace the place I labored (I’ve toned down the true saying, be happy to insert your individual expletive as applicable):
Assumption is the mom of all **actually dangerous errors**