Quartz: “The Australian election produced a winner no pollster predicted: Prime minister Scott Morrison’s ruling coalition remained in power, despite all expectations to the contrary. After the surprise outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump as US president, what now feels like the most predictable outcome of any election is that the pollsters will be wrong. There are many reasons why they keep getting it wrong, including confirmation bias, when journalists and pollsters looking for data that validates their prior beliefs. It could also be the nature of some of these events is so unusual they were impossible to predict.

Forecasts rely on data from the past, and while we now have better data than ever—and better techniques and technology with which to measure them—when it comes to forecasting, in many ways, data has never been more useless. And as data become more integral to our lives and the technology we rely upon, we must take a harder look at the past before we assume it tells us anything about the future. To some extent, the weaknesses of data has always existed. Data are, by definition, information about what has happened in the past. Because populations and technology are constantly changing, they alter how we respond to incentives, policy, opportunities available to us, and even social cues. This undermines the accuracy of everything we try to forecast: elections, financial markets, even how long it will take to get to the airport…

We are in the age of big data that offers to promise of more accurate predictions. But it seems in some of the most critical aspects of our lives, data has never been more wrong…”