Tarnished Silver (Nate Silver) by Paul Krugman

[Chathamization]

10. People who treat it as if it's plural often have a difficult time using it consistantly

Here's an example from Krugman's article on Silver:

But you can’t be an effective fox just by letting the data speak for itself — because it never does. You use data to inform your analysis, you let it tell you that your pet hypothesis is wrong, but data are never a substitute for hard thinking. If you think the data are speaking for themselves, what you’re really doing is implicit theorizing, which is a really bad idea (because you can’t test your assumptions if you don’t even know what you’re assuming.)

If when they're able to is it somewhat consistently, they seem to accept terms like "piece of data" and "data scientist" which aren't consistent with treating it like a plural. And this is on top of a somewhat shaky theoretical ground (as I noted in the other post, people who actually use the word "datum" frequently use the plural "datums&quot .

I wouldn't call it correct.