My beef with Brooks: the alternative to “good statistics” is not “no statistics,” it’s “bad statistics”

I was thinking more about David Brooks’s anti-data column from yesterday, and I realized what is really bothering me. Brooks expresses skepticism about numbers, about the limitations of raw data, about the importance of human thinking. Fine, I agree with all of this, to some extent. But then Brooks turns around uses numbers unquestioningly and [...]