Has something like this ever happened to you?
You see something crazy on a dashboard - your website traffic doubled today out of nowhere!
You rule out the usual suspects - no front page of reddit, Barack Obama didn't tweet about you. Something else must be going on.
You changed a button color this morning, could that be it?
Maybe people really like purple and are sharing links to your site with all of their friends! Or maybe Google decided to rank your site higher in search results because it looks so much nicer now!
Either way, you're about to be rich! Time to start looking on Zillow for the next house you're going to buy.
Wait a minute, you decide to double check that button color change you made earlier.
Oh crap! You notice a typo that's making every page view event fire twice!
Your traffic didn't actually double. The tracking was just broken!
Next time, $10M mansion, next time.
If this sounds at all familiar, you aren't alone.
Twyman's Law states that the more unusual or interesting a piece of data, the more likely that it's false.
It's in the same vein as "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
So next time you discover something amazing in your data, your first thought should be "why is this data wrong?" and not "which Hawaiian island am I going to retire to?"
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