Data Is Overrated

Data Is Overrated

5 December 2025

I’ve said it before: data is overrated. We live in an age of data fetishism. That point was reaffirmed for me on 25 November 2022, during the farewell lecture by my PhD supervisor, Professor Paul Frissen. Not a coincidence.

When I explained that the housing market — real estate — in Curaçao was overheating, many people dismissed it as “just a feeling.” Only when economists put a few numbers on paper did everyone suddenly believe it. The economists were praised for “identifying” what was evident in the narrative long before. Without the data, they didn’t see it.

We have become convinced that everything must be data-driven and evidence-based. Why? Because data offers the illusion of certainty. People who struggle to think further, who have difficulty seeing patterns or exploring scenarios, reach for data as a crutch. Numbers feel safe. Numbers don’t lie — until they do. Or until something happens that no model could have predicted.

Take the qualification of Blue Wave, the Curaçao national football team, for the 2026 World Cup. According to the data, this is impossible. A country of barely 150,000 people is not supposed to qualify. If we had been truly data-driven, we wouldn’t even have started.

So let’s tone down the data obsession a bit. Think for yourself. Use imagination. Dare to connect dots without waiting for a spreadsheet to validate you. The greatest thinkers in history did their work with very little data — but with insight, intuition, and courage.

Miguel Goede