Invitation to Data Readings

I’ve worked in the data business for decades. Took a data company public. Built models that moved markets and advised organizations that shaped policy. I know how the numbers are made, who makes them, and what they leave out.

I’m also dyslexic. They put me in special education because I couldn’t read. Numbers became the first language that never lied to me, a foreign language I turned out to be native in. That’s not a credential. It’s the reason I care about this as much as I do.

This series is for anyone who has ever trusted a statistic they probably shouldn’t have, felt manipulated by a metric they couldn’t quite argue with, or wondered why the data said one thing and the world seemed to say another.

There’s another reason I started writing now. Artificial intelligence speaks to us in words, but it thinks in data. The numbers underneath the answer it gives you are invisible. I have spent my whole career looking behind numbers. Most people haven’t. And the machines are not going to wait for everyone to catch up.

Short pieces built from real projects, experiments, and problems I’ve seen up close. Written for people who create data and for people who live with the results, which at this point is all of us.

The gap between what the numbers say and what is actually true. And the very human business of navigating that gap every day.

That is what this is about. Welcome.

The Great Zandini Sees:
“The most dangerous thing about a number is how certain it sounds.”