We go with tweaking the numbers feeling and then make the numbers lie.
My experience is, most of the time, numbers don’t lie. Many times, when we doubt the numbers, it’s because we have been mischievous and pretend incorrect input is correct.
For example, while calculating return on investment, we love to ignore the correct return projected by tweaking the numbers because we want to go ahead and make the investment anyhow. And then, when the investment doesn’t generate the desired return, we console ourselves that our research was correct, but the luck was bad.
How many times do we ignore the numbers and make clearly emotional decisions, and have no rationale attached to them?
If we want numbers not to lie, we need to stop telling lies to the numbers.