> I originally claimed that data-driven culture leads bad arguments involving data to be favored over good arguments that don’t
This is symptomatic of the deeper problem of thinking in terms of bumper stickers and slogans, instead of thinking from first principles. When it afflicts educated people, usually you hear slogans like "an anecdote is not data", or "that's the slippery slope fallacy". Instead of grappling with noisy reality, they have sharp cognitive categories with firm boundaries between concepts, then they try to squeeze things into these categories in order to make cognition easier because the relations between the categories are already understood. This gives them the illusion of rigorous and clear thought.
This is symptomatic of the deeper problem of thinking in terms of bumper stickers and slogans, instead of thinking from first principles. When it afflicts educated people, usually you hear slogans like "an anecdote is not data", or "that's the slippery slope fallacy". Instead of grappling with noisy reality, they have sharp cognitive categories with firm boundaries between concepts, then they try to squeeze things into these categories in order to make cognition easier because the relations between the categories are already understood. This gives them the illusion of rigorous and clear thought.