About

Hi! My name is Drew Sikkink. I started this blog because I missed making my own arguments. While I cannot make these arguments without the research and opinions of those more knowledgable than me, my understanding of issues has suffered because all I do is read and listen. Without engaging topics with my own words and thoughts, I cannot truly understand the problem. Enter “In the Data’s Own Words.”

This name was inspired by a quote from Ronald Coase, a British economist who won the Nobel prize in 1991. Coase cautioned against approaching the data with previously established biases and hacking away at anaylses until the theory was confirmed. In his own words: “if you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” His actual quote may have been “… nature will confess,” but either way the warning is clear.

While I think it is practically impossible to put aside all biases (a topic for a future post, perhaps!), I chose “In the Data’s Own Words” as my blog’s title to remind myself of this commitment to honest truth-seeking. In this blog, I will pursue these answers by drawing on wisdom of elders and by listening to the data.