Statistics are like religion. We may think values are based on interpretation of data, but in reality, most of the time our interpretation of data is based on an outlook, weltanschauung we already have, what we assimilated in childhood or young adulthood, an outlook that doed not budge or change easily. It’s easy to make data fit our outlook or to reinterpret data, or manipulate data, or to simply ignore data that doesn’t fit into our preconceived notions of how things should be.

It’s much harder for us humans to honestly change our outlooks if we see that the data just don’t fit. It’s almost impossible to be completely objective, especially considering that the amount of data flying out of the world’s servers is starting to rival the size of the known universe. Even picking the data that we want to focus on and ignoring the data we don’t care about is itself part of trying to make the world fit into our own systems.

Take VIP vs mass market revenues in Macau for example. The encouraging headlines all over the internet now are that mass market revenue growth has outpaced VIP revenue for Q2. That sounds good, and maybe it is. But maybe it doesn’t indicate anything important. Regardless, bulls will read the headline bullishly, making the argument that mass market revenues are more stable and therefore Macau is stabilizing into a less volatile market long term. Bears will either ignore the data point as irrelevant or reinterpret it as VIP growth slowing down too much, rather than mass market growth improving. Macau still depends on VIP, they’ll say, as over 55% of Macau gross gaming revenue is still from VIP. Even if mass market growth outpaces VIP, Macau is still heavily reliant on VIP and one quarter of outpaced growth doesn’t change that.

Let’s do a test, a game of sorts. I’ll put a link to a headline below and before you click on it, guess what year it’s from. Ready?