Are more rare events happening in the world or are we just more aware of what is going on?

In other words, the more data you have, the greater the likelihood you’ll see wildly improbable phenomena. And that’s particularly relevant in this era of unlimited information. “Because of the Internet, we have access to billions of events around the world,” says Len Stefanski, who teaches statistics at North Carolina State University. “So yeah, it feels like the world’s going crazy. But if you think about it logically, there are so many possibilities for something unusual to happen. We’re just seeing more of them.” Science says that uncovering and accessing more data will help us make sense of the world. But it’s also true that more data exposes how random the world really is.

Here is an alternative explanation for why all these rare events seem to be happening: we are bumping up against our limited ability to predict all the complexity of the world.

All of this, though, ignores a more fundamental and unsettling possibility: that the models were simply wrong. That the Falcons were never 99.6 percent favorites to win. That Trump’s odds never fell as low as the polling suggested. That the mathematicians and statisticians missed something in painting their numerical portrait of the universe, and that our ability to make predictions was thus inherently flawed. It’s this feeling—that our mental models have somehow failed us—that haunted so many of us during the Super Bowl. It’s a feeling that the Trump administration exploits every time it makes the argument that the mainstream media, in failing to predict Trump’s victory, betrayed a deep misunderstanding about the country and the world and therefore can’t be trusted.

And maybe it isn’t very easy to reconcile these two explanations:

So: Which is it? Does the Super Bowl, and the election before it, represent an improbable but ultimately-not-confidence-shattering freak event? Or does it indicate that our models are broken, that—when it comes down to it—our understanding of the world is deeply incomplete or mistaken? We can’t know. It’s the nature of probability that it can never be disproven, unless you can replicate the exact same football game or hold the same election thousands of times simultaneously. (You can’t.) That’s not to say that models aren’t valuable, or that you should ignore them entirely; that would suggest that data is meaningless, that there’s no possibility of accurately representing the world through math, and we know that’s not true. And perhaps at some point, the world will revert to the mean, and behave in a more predictable fashion. But you have to ask yourself: What are the odds?

I know there is a lot of celebration of having so much available information today but it isn’t necessarily easy adjusting to the changes. Taking it all in requires some effort on its own but the hard work is in the interpretation and knowing what to do with it all.

Perhaps a class in statistics – in addition to existing efforts involving digital or media literacy – could help many people better understand all of this.