In the same vein as Angela Bassa's post on 'data not being ground truth', Julia Rose West has a very good piece for Slate discussing how Moneyball (and other similar pop-culture influences) have tipped the scales too far the other way - people are now not skeptical enough when presented with data.

“But this moneyball-ization assumes that all information is reliable information, algorithms are unbiased magic, and big data can also paint the big picture. The scenarios where this has already happened have become all too familiar. Take the 2016 election. Most of us put our faith in the forecasting numbers, charts, maps, and needles that told us Hillary Clinton would be in the White House now. It took for the dissonance we experienced late Nov. 8 to consider the sources behind those predictions. Cade Metz wrote in Wired that Trump’s win “wasn’t so much a failure of the data as it was a failure of the people using the data ... a failure of the willingness to believe too blindly in data, not to see it for how flawed it really is.” ”