About the Author
The Path to These Books
The thread that connects all five books is a question that has followed me through two decades of work: how do people form judgments from data, and what goes wrong when they do it poorly?
My formal training began in measurement and psychometrics. I spent years studying how constructs get operationalized, how scales behave, and how small design decisions in a survey instrument cascade into large problems in the analysis. That work gave me a deep respect for the gap between “collecting data” and “having good data.” It also made me skeptical of any analysis that treats measurement as a solved problem.
From there, the work moved toward data visualization and visual analytics. If measurement is about getting good numbers in, visualization is about getting useful meaning out. I became interested in how people read charts, where perception fails, and what it takes to communicate uncertainty honestly. The research drew on cognitive psychology, cartography, and design, but the driving concern stayed practical: can the person looking at this chart make a better decision because of it?
The most recent chapter involves AI and large language models. These tools are reshaping how people interact with data, and they introduce new versions of old problems. A language model can generate a plausible-sounding interpretation of a regression table, but plausibility is not the same as correctness. The skills in these books — statistical reasoning, coding, measurement, research design, visualization — are precisely the skills a person needs to evaluate what AI produces and to know when to override it.
These five books exist because I kept encountering the same gaps. Students would arrive in a research methods course without a working understanding of variation. Analysts would build dashboards without thinking about whether the underlying data was measured well. Managers would cite a p-value without being able to explain what it meant. The problems were consistent, and the existing textbooks were not solving them. So I wrote the books I wished I could have handed to those students and analysts and managers, in the order I wished they had encountered the ideas.