You read three reviews before picking a restaurant. You scroll through whatever the feed puts in front of you this morning.
Data and artificial intelligence now shape decisions we barely notice: the news that reaches us, the price we're offered, the loan application approved or declined, the job application filtered out before a human ever reads it. We encounter data everywhere, in charts, statistics, reports, headlines, recommendations, and AI-generated answers. It often looks objective, precise, and authoritative. We rarely ask whether that impression is earned.
The Data-Literate Mind is a guide to critical thinking in the age of data and AI. It draws on a decade of experience teaching data science and AI literacy across academia and industry.
Data is a representation of reality, not reality itself. Even accurate numbers can lead you to the wrong conclusion if you don't understand what lies behind them: what was measured, what was left out, and how the result was produced.
You will learn to:Recognize the hidden assumptions behind data and statistics
Understand how cognitive bias, selection bias, measurement, and visualization can distort your view of reality
Think more critically about numbers, probabilities, and correlations
Recognize how algorithms and AI can produce convincing but misleading answers
Develop an intuition for how AI works and why it produces the answers it does
Improve your decision making when evidence is incomplete or ambiguous

Rated 9/10 by getAbstract, The Data-Literate Mind doesn't ask you to distrust data or AI. It asks you to understand exactly what they can and cannot tell you.
If you have ever wondered whether the numbers in front of you are telling the whole story, this book will change the way you see them.