“data are never neutral”

“Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for.” —@taylorswift13 in Innovation Lessons from Taylor Swift by @skap5

Reg Revans — “Unless your ideas are ridiculed by experts, they are worth nothing.” via @ShaunCoffey

In the Pursuit of Knowledge, There Be Dragons

“Data are never neutral. They are biased. They are rife with uncertainty and limitations and all sorts of other imperfections. But for data to be legitimate in the eyes of non-technical actors, data must be performed as precise and objective and neutral. This creates a conundrum from anyone whose practice relies on communicating data. When high-powered people want to rely on data as truth, they don’t want to be faced with confidence intervals or error bars. They want to be told that the data are reliable, by which they mean accurate, by which they mean a perfect representation of whatever they wanted to measure. Ignorance is bliss. It’s also political.”

“If you focus on sickness, you’re going to end up with doctors as the key actors. If you focus on well-being, you’re going to end up with communities as key actors.” —@CormacRussell

Buurtzorg: the Dutch model of neighbourhood care that is going global

“The principle underpinning the model is that the nurse acts as a ‘health coach’ for the individual and their family, emphasising preventive health measures but also delivering necessary care themselves or calling on others to do so. The golden rule is that nurses must spend 61% of their time in direct contact with the people they support.”

“Expecting the mainstream media to rescue you from fascism is like expecting the person who left you in the dark woods to come back and give you a ride home.” —@MarkJacob16

How Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Gwyneth Paltrow Short-Circuit Your Ability to Think Rationally

• Narrative Laundering
• False Equivalence
• Faux Intimacy
• Appeal to Misplaced Authority
• The Big Lie
• Appeal to Fear
• Butterfly Attack
• Data Voids
• Black Propaganda

“Put all the bad drivers on bicycles, and nobody dies.” —Jeremy Vine

Image via @VanderbiltLibraries