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As someone who has just left the advertising industry, and was doing data stuff, the real issue is that a lot of companies have a lot of data but almost none of
by FridgeSeal 8y ago
As someone who has just left the advertising industry, and was doing data stuff, the real issue is that a lot of companies have a lot of data but almost none of it has any actual useful information content in it. It’s a bit of a hard concept to explain to explain to people because they go “but there’s a hundred something columns, and hundreds of millions of rows!”, you can have all the data you want, but if it’s all non-indicative trash you’re not going to be able to usefully predict anything, but hey, you’ve hired a data scientist now and added the cost of a big spark cluster to your AWS bill now, so you may as well continue telling the market you’ve got some real hot stuff.
- manigandham 8y agoYes, agreed. Lots of useless data out there that doesn't really have significant signals. Also a lot of it is duplicated with everyone getting the same logs, so I find it hard to believe that any single company magically derived a big advantage over another. Not to mention, no amount of AI powered results can beat a slick sales team. $1M spent on quality salesperson is much higher ROI than $1M on fancy AI engineering when it comes to relationship-powered media spend.
- PeterisP 8y agoIn statistics, there's a classic quote by John Tukey "The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data." This should be printed in large letters on the wall of anybody claiming to do data science.