Toward Sustainable Insights, or Why Polygamy is Bad for You

Have you ever been in a sauna? If yes, according to our recent survey conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, people who go to saunas are more likely to know that Mike Stonebraker is not a character in “The Simpsons”. While this result clearly makes no sense, recently proposed tools to automatically suggest visualizations, correlations, or perform visual data exploration, significantly increase the chance that a user makes a false discovery like this one. In this paper, we first show how current tools mislead users to consider random fluctuations as significant discoveries. We then describe our vision and early results for QUDE, a new system for automatically controlling the various risk factors during the data exploration process.