6 ms·

My experience is that most people in business are 1) terrible at constructing trials, tests, or experiments, of any sort whatsoever, 2) terrible at interpreting

by asark 7y ago

My experience is that most people in business are 1) terrible at constructing trials, tests, or experiments, of any sort whatsoever, 2) terrible at interpreting the results of same, and 3) have a very limited tolerance for discussion of how bad they are at it and why their various tests are meaningless, no matter how gently it's presented. I've not seen a place where this isn't broadly true, no matter where the business folks come from (top-tier B-school analysts, Bob's discount MBA emporium, doesn't matter) or how good the reputation of the firm they're at. This also extends to management and administration in the public sector—schools are rife with obvious pseudo-science bullshit, bad attempts to replicate results while skipping half the measures that were taken, et c., but dumb-ass superintendents (you would not believe it, seriously, "dumb-ass" was not chosen lightly) and principals eat it up. [EDIT] which is to say I'm not at all surprised design "science" is full of BS, because it's sold to people who almost all suck at evaluating those kinds of things. Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good.

abacadaba 7y ago
a depressingly accurate assessment. > Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good. as long as it's reeaally expensive. that's really the only way to asses the accuracy and importance of these things.
kadendogthing 7y ago
What are one-dimensional business people actually good at? Besides just being a piece in the system that soaks up resources?
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  Learning and exploiting unwritten rules of a game referred to as business.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamesmanship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamesmanship
- cortesoft 7y ago
  Making deals with similar people at other companies.
- noelsusman 7y ago
  They're good at talking to people and convincing them of things, which is enormously valuable in business.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  The good ones are good at convincing, negotiating, charming, manipulating, uniting people, turning people against each other etc. All very important skills out in the real world of human interactions and they translate to $$ quite directly.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
gridlockd 7y ago
I would go much further and say almost all "science" is done poorly. The scientific method, when applied rigorously (!), is deeply uneconomical in the vast majority of cases, because the market has already eliminated most glaring inefficiencies by pure trial and error. Any possible gains are likely marginal anyway. Doing a bunch of half-assed and meaningless experiments just to slap the prestigious "science" label on something on the other hand is very economical. So that's what people do instead.
- themodelplumber 7y ago
  Also, if you've studied human psychology in depth, you realize that the scientific method is a mirror of a very specific set of traits "owned" by a subset of humans. If you're on the outside of that subset, it turns out that not only is it easier just to slap the label on, but your ideal customer (relative to your psychology) doesn't really care to do much more than a simple label check anyway. From zero to 'rm -rf science-budget' in one marketing exercise. A sad truth but coming around to it can help us understand why scientists need to work on social policy and outreach messaging as well. Scientific values simply will not sell themselves the way we think they should, outside of our little sphere. Fortunately our cultural messaging has vastly improved in this domain recently. Bridge psychologies like that of Bill Nye are great examples of how this can work.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- parksy 7y ago
  I'm also interested in what motivates this behaviour. Anecdotally I feel that the current incentive structure is entirely financial. People may get into a field to do good, but they have to justify an ROI on everything they do. Society fetishizes financial success and universally condemns financial failure. Live in that world as a struggling student scientist, juggling the prospects of a "marketable" thesis versus an ethical one, as debts pile up and staring down the barrel of your entire life amounting to being yet another mediocre drone / living on the streets / not being a scientist at all. The prospect of being completely broke, unable to afford rent, unable to afford food, being an embarrassment to friends and family, these factors exist and must surely inform the judgement and behaviours of students in a position to have a study funded. I know of phd's still struggling in their careers against the same thing, where an institute is more interested in publicity than the actual science. The symptom may be half-assed and meaningless experiments but that is not to say the individuals responsible aren't capable or willing of so much more if the appropriate supporting social structures existed to allow ethical scientific thinkers to exist, or if institutions stopped taking in students for the money and instead tested applicants for profit. It's easy to point out the problem but how can it be solved? To me, I think there needs to be publicly funded institutes that have no profit motive and exist purely to intake the best academic minds, this might seem anti capitalist but as a model it is an investment in the future of a society that is calculated in quality rather than quantity.
fsloth 7y ago
Remember that academia has a longer history as an accreditation vehicle for any concept you can come up with as long as you write convincingly enough, than as a platform of science since academia predates science by centuries if not millenias. I think this tradition of authoritarian bullshit has some traction in the modern world still. Which in part causes all the silly pompous pseudoscientific bullshit.
omginternets 7y ago
Hell, I'll go a step further. Most people business (especially business schools) are absolutely abysmal at structured thought and reasoned analysis. Simple shit like p -> q, orders of magnitude, independent probabilities, partitioning[0], and the classic correlation/causation go completely over their heads. At the risk of sounding arrogant or elitist, there's a reason the peripatetic school inscribed "let none but geometers enter here". By and large, a mathematical education structures thought in a way that nothing else can. [0] My personal pet peeves. People seem unable to break concepts down into component parts that both (a) cover the entire problem and (b) don't overlap.
- exelius 7y ago
  So... my business school covered all of that. Probability, statistics, linear algebra, diffeq... and yes, boolean algebra in the context of gradient descent. Even Markov chains and neural nets. Needless to say, there was a lot of math. Interviews at top business schools are nothing but partitioning and mathematical analysis. Google “business school case interviews”. Modern business is analytical and quantitative. Over 50% of my classmates came from software development or engineering backgrounds. This mix is not at all unusual. I think your reaction may be to the PHB types — who aren’t good at any of that but they have soft skills (aka people like them) so they get promoted. Honestly the biggest truism in business is that it’s better to be liked than to be good.
  - woah 7y ago
    I doubt the poster you’re replying to based their post on much of anything at all. It reads like a classic ego stroke.
    - exelius 7y ago
      Yeah just had to say something because it was 100% opposite from my experience. Like they literally hammered everything he claims business people lack into our heads ;)
  - omginternets 7y ago
ryanmcbride 7y ago
Completely agree. In my experience every client I've worked with that wanted 'User Testing' or 'A/B Testing' would have lofty goals of having an awesome product backed by science, but at the end of the day were unwilling or unable to actually execute it in a way that did anything other than smush the data into the shape they wanted. They already have results in mind, they just want some data to support their conclusion so they can put it up on a slide for 10 seconds in a meeting.

by asark 7y ago

abacadaba 7y ago

a depressingly accurate assessment. > Any "science" that largely exists to sell stuff to middle- and upper-management or "stakeholders" probably tends to be awful, because it doesn't need to be good. as long as it's reeaally expensive. that's really the only way to asses the accuracy and importance of these things.

kadendogthing 7y ago

What are one-dimensional business people actually good at? Besides just being a piece in the system that soaks up resources?

EForEndeavour 7y ago
Learning and exploiting unwritten rules of a game referred to as business.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamesmanship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamesmanship
cortesoft 7y ago
Making deals with similar people at other companies.
noelsusman 7y ago
They're good at talking to people and convincing them of things, which is enormously valuable in business.
bonoboTP 7y ago
The good ones are good at convincing, negotiating, charming, manipulating, uniting people, turning people against each other etc. All very important skills out in the real world of human interactions and they translate to $$ quite directly.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

gridlockd 7y ago

I would go much further and say almost all "science" is done poorly. The scientific method, when applied rigorously (!), is deeply uneconomical in the vast majority of cases, because the market has already eliminated most glaring inefficiencies by pure trial and error. Any possible gains are likely marginal anyway. Doing a bunch of half-assed and meaningless experiments just to slap the prestigious "science" label on something on the other hand is very economical. So that's what people do instead.

themodelplumber 7y ago
Also, if you've studied human psychology in depth, you realize that the scientific method is a mirror of a very specific set of traits "owned" by a subset of humans. If you're on the outside of that subset, it turns out that not only is it easier just to slap the label on, but your ideal customer (relative to your psychology) doesn't really care to do much more than a simple label check anyway. From zero to 'rm -rf science-budget' in one marketing exercise. A sad truth but coming around to it can help us understand why scientists need to work on social policy and outreach messaging as well. Scientific values simply will not sell themselves the way we think they should, outside of our little sphere. Fortunately our cultural messaging has vastly improved in this domain recently. Bridge psychologies like that of Bill Nye are great examples of how this can work.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
parksy 7y ago
I'm also interested in what motivates this behaviour. Anecdotally I feel that the current incentive structure is entirely financial. People may get into a field to do good, but they have to justify an ROI on everything they do. Society fetishizes financial success and universally condemns financial failure. Live in that world as a struggling student scientist, juggling the prospects of a "marketable" thesis versus an ethical one, as debts pile up and staring down the barrel of your entire life amounting to being yet another mediocre drone / living on the streets / not being a scientist at all. The prospect of being completely broke, unable to afford rent, unable to afford food, being an embarrassment to friends and family, these factors exist and must surely inform the judgement and behaviours of students in a position to have a study funded. I know of phd's still struggling in their careers against the same thing, where an institute is more interested in publicity than the actual science. The symptom may be half-assed and meaningless experiments but that is not to say the individuals responsible aren't capable or willing of so much more if the appropriate supporting social structures existed to allow ethical scientific thinkers to exist, or if institutions stopped taking in students for the money and instead tested applicants for profit. It's easy to point out the problem but how can it be solved? To me, I think there needs to be publicly funded institutes that have no profit motive and exist purely to intake the best academic minds, this might seem anti capitalist but as a model it is an investment in the future of a society that is calculated in quality rather than quantity.

fsloth 7y ago

Remember that academia has a longer history as an accreditation vehicle for any concept you can come up with as long as you write convincingly enough, than as a platform of science since academia predates science by centuries if not millenias. I think this tradition of authoritarian bullshit has some traction in the modern world still. Which in part causes all the silly pompous pseudoscientific bullshit.

omginternets 7y ago

Hell, I'll go a step further. Most people business (especially business schools) are absolutely abysmal at structured thought and reasoned analysis. Simple shit like p -> q, orders of magnitude, independent probabilities, partitioning[0], and the classic correlation/causation go completely over their heads. At the risk of sounding arrogant or elitist, there's a reason the peripatetic school inscribed "let none but geometers enter here". By and large, a mathematical education structures thought in a way that nothing else can. [0] My personal pet peeves. People seem unable to break concepts down into component parts that both (a) cover the entire problem and (b) don't overlap.

exelius 7y ago
So... my business school covered all of that. Probability, statistics, linear algebra, diffeq... and yes, boolean algebra in the context of gradient descent. Even Markov chains and neural nets. Needless to say, there was a lot of math. Interviews at top business schools are nothing but partitioning and mathematical analysis. Google “business school case interviews”. Modern business is analytical and quantitative. Over 50% of my classmates came from software development or engineering backgrounds. This mix is not at all unusual. I think your reaction may be to the PHB types — who aren’t good at any of that but they have soft skills (aka people like them) so they get promoted. Honestly the biggest truism in business is that it’s better to be liked than to be good.
- woah 7y ago
  I doubt the poster you’re replying to based their post on much of anything at all. It reads like a classic ego stroke.
  - exelius 7y ago
    Yeah just had to say something because it was 100% opposite from my experience. Like they literally hammered everything he claims business people lack into our heads ;)
- omginternets 7y ago

ryanmcbride 7y ago

Completely agree. In my experience every client I've worked with that wanted 'User Testing' or 'A/B Testing' would have lofty goals of having an awesome product backed by science, but at the end of the day were unwilling or unable to actually execute it in a way that did anything other than smush the data into the shape they wanted. They already have results in mind, they just want some data to support their conclusion so they can put it up on a slide for 10 seconds in a meeting.