Data and truth; your brain on AI; authors on substack: Newsletter 23 July 2025

Newsletter 102. New truths from survey data, how AI twists writers’ minds, and Scholastic’s implosion, plus three people to follow and three books to read.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics

It’s pretty damn easy to create statistics these days.

I know what I’m talking about. In 1996, I helped create and launch Technographics, Forrester’s survey product, a large scale set of consumer surveys about people’s attitudes about technology. We fielded tens of thousands of paper surveys by mail, then had them compiled and wrote reports about the results. We gathered statistics that you couldn’t come by any other way.

Now, anybody can create a statistics. Coding a survey in a tool like SurveyMonkey is effortless. Sharing the link for respondents to fill it out is easy. Compiling the results is child’s play.

Any time you see a statistic — like “We only use 10% of our brains” — you need to ask where it came from.

There are so many ways it could be bullshit.

It could be completely made up. (That’s 78% more common than it was ten years ago. And yes, that’s a statistic I just made up.)

It could be repeated from some undependable source. Like the “fact” that there are 100,000 child porn sites, a questionably sourced number that keeps surfacing as one source quotes another quoting another, with no verification.

It could be from a survey that was intentionally designed to mislead with built-in bias.

Or it could just be from a tiny or unrepresentative sample that doesn’t reflect the underlying population it purports to represent. (Did they survey attitudes about desserts from the line of people waiting for the ice cream truck?)

I’m about to field a very interesting survey. We’ll be casting the net wide to get a large and hopefully representative sample. I’ll do everything possible to remove bias from the sample and to honestly represent what it shows, even (or especially) if it’s not what I expected.

And I’ll clearly document my methods and the limits of my analysis, so you can make your own judgment.

There’s a whole book about how to be smart about this stuff: Fact Forward: The Perils of Bad Information and the Promise of a Data-Savvy Society by Dan Gaylin, CEO of the nonprofit research organization NORC. If you want to be smart about data, it’s a great place to learn.

But I’m not here to tell you how to interpret the data you read.

I’m here to tell you not to pollute the Internet with bullshit data.

It’s not about the tools you use anymore. It’s about the effort you use to collect a representative sample, the survey design that’s balanced rather than biased, and the analysis that clearly states its funding and limitations.

We have the ability to create much more and better knowledge now. Let’s be sure we don’t waste it flooding the world with more lies and damn lies.

News for writers and others who think

In The New York Times, a writing teacher describes how AI is changing the way her students think — and how she does, too.

The Guardian provides a fascinating list of prominent professional authors now on Substack.

The Poynter Institute helpfully provides a template for a newsroom’s ethical AI policy.

In the Wall Street Journal, an examination of how Scholastic — swollen on the sugary high of Harry Potter — is contracting without more hits on the horizon.

Sales of books and other content about child rapist Jeffrey Epstein are surging. Ew. Although I can think of one other person who’s even more unhappy with this than I am.

Aaron Shulman and Lauren Hamlin have started a weekly newsletter called Move 37 on how writers are using AI.

Three people to follow

Joe Bunting, who’s dedicated to exercises that will teach you to write better.

Michael Long, talented ghostwriter and writing teacher.

Roy Peter Clark , philosopher of writing and priest of brevity.

Three books to read

Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic (Knopf, 2025). The Internet is queering how we talk. Who’s in charge here?

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green (Crash Course Books, 2025). A consuming history of consumption.

Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful by David Enrich (Mariner Books, 2025). The press gets special legal protections — and for good reason. Could that privilege be torn down by American autocrats?