Information is not clean. Information is never perfect. Yet, we have to cope with incomplete and dirty information all the time. And we have different imperfect methods for dealing this. Trying to clean the information seems like the most rational and objective approach, but the act of cleaning the information contaminates the information in some way.

You guess, you make assumptions, or you even try to go back to the source, but this effort can be time consuming and flawed. It is easier to ignore flawed information, but that can has other risks too.

The key point is that you can’t always take all data at face value. While data-based decisions seem highly rational on the surface, the underlying data has been sanitized for your protection.