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This is a recipe for mediocrity. Great things are created by people following their gut, not their metrics. Jobs didn’t have a data scientist telling him to ma

by jbob2000 7y ago

This is a recipe for mediocrity. Great things are created by people following their gut, not their metrics. Jobs didn’t have a data scientist telling him to make the iPhone. A data scientist would have told Notch to make a Call of Duty clone instead of Minecraft. There was no data scientist behind Gates, Warren, Zuckerberg, Musk, or anyone of their ilk. Looking back in history, some great discoveries and inventions were held back because the “data” said it wasn’t possible. Everybody thought ulcers were caused by stress and bad food, then Barry Marshall came along and literally trusted his gut by eating a bunch of bacteria to prove that’s how ulcers were formed. At best, data science helps you squeeze a couple extra bucks from someone else’s ingenuity. Once Jobs died, the data scientists got their hands on the iPhone and chopped it up into different models. And it was the data scientists who made your Facebook feed ad-ridden junk. And at worst, data science is destroying our society. It’s the data scientists who are driving this insane data vacuum that is plaguing the internet and our daily lives. You thwarted the 2016 election by weaponizing data against America. You did it again with brexit. No doubt you will be out in full force for every major political event for the next few decades, sullying the discourse of the electorate. Bit of a rant... sorry. I hate this over-reliance on data and the smugness it’s captors carry.

mdorazio 7y ago
I would say it's a recipe for continuation rather than innovation. You're unlikely to invent anything revolutionary just by looking at metrics, but you're also unlikely to keep a business going without them. It's easy to look at something like the iPhone and say, "metrics didn't invent that!" but metrics absolutely put millions of phones in the hands of customers, built an effective production and supply chain, optimized the whole experience, and turned Apple into a trillion dollar company. As with most things, there's a balance and a place for each.
- jbob2000 7y ago
  I disagree that metrics helped Apple scale, but we’d have to wade in to a semantic debate to settle this. When you have a killer idea, scaling is obvious; just do more. More people, more machines, more materials, etc. You don’t need a number to tell you how much more to scale, because you always want the max anyways. Tim Cook was told there weren’t enough CNC machines in the world to manufacture the unibody MacBook. So he bought the company that makes CNC machines. What’s the point of metrics when you can shift the entire world to meet your needs? Great things are like that. Metrics are for mediocre products and services. We use them in banking because people fucking hate the banking system and we have to pull teeth to get customers to spend money. McDonald’s uses metrics to gauge how shitty they can make their beef without people noticing. Hollywood uses metrics to decide which movie franchise to reboot or make a sequel of. Metrics are a sign that you are done innovating and you are squeezing the sponge before someone else’s innovation dethrones yours.
  - nitwit005 7y ago
    > You don’t need a number to tell you how much more to scale, because you always want the max anyways. And you bankrupted the company building factories you didn't need, because iPhone demand has its limits.
  - leeoniya 7y ago
    i mostly agree with you. great intuition and experience can largely reduce the need for metrics. the problem is that not every business decision is clear cut and people who have to make them are not always Jobs or Gates. what metrics give you is a way to give the average joe (which is most of us) a way to take calculated risks when there are multiple stakeholders each with their own opinion of what should be done. metrics - like statistics - can be used effectively as a guide or can be used obsessively like dogma.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
harlanji 7y ago
There is something about numbers that seems to push us into rational mode and totally subjugate the emotional side of us that does great without data, and allows for us to act in abundance. My best idea is to display something like standard deviation and a delta between actual and the target metric, perhaps as low resolution as green-yellow-red to the employee responsible for the metric. It may hypothetically be somebody's job it adjust the formula and never reveal more detail than that, in this scenario. A concrete example, if at a restaurant we expect meals to be delivered within 7 minutes and we see the nightly average is currently 8:08 then some team members might start pushing to go faster and cut corners, compromising discipline and training effort--even if the company's values include accuracy and precision above speed. The values are laid down by the visionary founders, but the only metric that the workers have is an exact number and target. Somewhere along the chain between founding and the last hands on the food the values can be lost, and I feel like chasing the metric has a lot to do with it. Everyone pushes to make the number "because" of some factor, in my opinion probably pressure from above or a colleague. Pardon me if I've abused any terms, thanks. The factor that I am sure of is entering scarcity mode rather than abundance mode, and I'd like to know more about how reading metrics affects us and whether there are known methods to systemically remove metrics from view such that we can remain true to all of the values outside of the metric. If we're short of a target then there is a gap in training or experience; nobody should be so driven by metrics that it overrides their acting in abundance. I know this can be said to be coming from fantasy land but I've come from working in a number of domains in a short period of time, I feel like there's something in here even if it's hard to find.
threeseed 7y ago
1. Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone. 2. Apple has a very large Product Marketing team who do extensive quantitive and qualitative research on what products they should make, features should be delivered etc. This is the same for Microsoft, Facebook etc. I worked at Apple and each team will have a Product Owner/Program Manager assigned who decides what is done where as Engineers decide how it is done. 3. Data Scientists aren't solely responsible for releasing more iPhone models or how many ads to show. Those sort of decisions are cross-functional involving Finance, Product, Marketing, Strategy etc. 4. Data Scientists are basically engineers. They largely do what they are told to do by the "business". So not sure why you seem to think they are root of all evil.
- jbob2000 7y ago
  I think you’re missing the forest for the trees in my comment. I’m not really criticizing Data Science, the job function, but the field in general and the obsession over it. Your last point kind of weighs in on a point I didn’t quite get to; that data can be found to reinforce any decision. If business wants to do X, they will have the data scientists prove to them that X is good. Data can be a huge force of tyranny in this way, this is where my disdain for the field comes from.
sammorrowdrums 7y ago
You need both, I agree that given metrics don't predict the possible futures that depart significantly from the current state, you do need to support innovation without numbers to always back those ideas up. For every iPhone there is for example the wireless technology that powers the iPhone, which needed a huge amount of data driven decisions to get mobile masts in the right places, reliably send and receive data... The battery tech. Each of those innovations was the product of some good ideas combined with data and improvements that lead to the next innovations with countless failed innovations along the way. I think you place too much emphasis on the "genius" that combines these novel ideas, and I'm not saying it isn't required, but I think there's a lot of these ideas that die and a lot more data behind them than is talked about. For the iPhone to work it had to to be at a time where the tech was right, the price of components could enable it to be sold at an acceptable price-point, the UX had to be tested on countless people. To be more succinct, the right amount of optimisation, data driven improvement and innovation combine with the right timing. Ceaseless optimisation can lead a good product to become horrible, but you need numbers. Surely you can see the symbiosis between things like data driven battery improvement and optimisation and the possiblity of something like the iPhone. The iPhone would not exist without data driven decisions. It wouldn't exist without vision and risk taking either.
DrScientist 7y ago
Sure is was JFK that got us to the moon, not the scientists and engineers doing calculations, experiments and looking at the data. Both vision and drive and the ability to execute are essential. What happened at Apple was engineers came to Jobs with a prototype and he saw the potential and drove it relentlessly forward. Same for the Mac - he saw what Xerox had done and recognized the potential. Yes he trusted his own judgement - but I'd say if you saw either Xerox prototype in the age of terminals or a touch device in the age of fiddly keyboards it doesn't take a genius to see the potential - it just takes a hero ( courage ) to bet on it. Finally, on the dark arts of advertising, moving from the 'gut' to being data driven - sadly I'd say that's what has made it more effective as a tool.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > Finally, on the dark arts of advertising, moving from the 'gut' to being data driven - sadly I'd say that's what has made it more effective as a tool. Part of the reason metrics work so well in marketing is because a lot of accepted industry practices are inherently malicious acts towards other human beings. So unlike other optimization processes, you don't care all that much about side effects of optimizing to metrics. For instance - do customers hate your guts for your advertising spam? Doesn't matter - the product becomes associated with a strong emotion, making it more likely some of them will buy it few months from now. Mission accomplished.
  - DrScientist 7y ago
    > do customers hate your guts for your advertising spam? > Doesn't matter - the product becomes associated with a strong emotion, making it more likely some of them will buy it few months from now. Interesting, does that really work? Got data you can point to, to back that one up? I take your broader point of them not really caring - we are seeing that in data driven politics in the UK right now. Obviously this host/parasite interaction will evolve - but at the moment it seems the population doesn't have many effective defenses. It's a bit like the opioid epidemic or obesity epidemic - currently people are being given the politics they apparently want.
k__ 7y ago
I'm not so sure. Sounds like a urban legend "idea guys" want to believe.
Nimitz14 7y ago
I agree with you. I feel a like optimizing metrics often leads to an overall worse product, but which, thanks to the actions of a minority of users who respond strongly to the change (while the rest grumble but don't change their behaviour much), gives the impression of having achieved an improvement.
6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago
Did you think my post was smug? Because I'm saying what you're saying. I agree with you. My post was just to say it's a tough pill to swallow. Bitter medicine is still medicine. Except I wouldn't say data science is destroying our society. Maybe data science done the blind lazy way is, but shitty science isn't representative of good science.

mdorazio 7y ago

I would say it's a recipe for continuation rather than innovation. You're unlikely to invent anything revolutionary just by looking at metrics, but you're also unlikely to keep a business going without them. It's easy to look at something like the iPhone and say, "metrics didn't invent that!" but metrics absolutely put millions of phones in the hands of customers, built an effective production and supply chain, optimized the whole experience, and turned Apple into a trillion dollar company. As with most things, there's a balance and a place for each.

jbob2000 7y ago
I disagree that metrics helped Apple scale, but we’d have to wade in to a semantic debate to settle this. When you have a killer idea, scaling is obvious; just do more. More people, more machines, more materials, etc. You don’t need a number to tell you how much more to scale, because you always want the max anyways. Tim Cook was told there weren’t enough CNC machines in the world to manufacture the unibody MacBook. So he bought the company that makes CNC machines. What’s the point of metrics when you can shift the entire world to meet your needs? Great things are like that. Metrics are for mediocre products and services. We use them in banking because people fucking hate the banking system and we have to pull teeth to get customers to spend money. McDonald’s uses metrics to gauge how shitty they can make their beef without people noticing. Hollywood uses metrics to decide which movie franchise to reboot or make a sequel of. Metrics are a sign that you are done innovating and you are squeezing the sponge before someone else’s innovation dethrones yours.
- nitwit005 7y ago
  > You don’t need a number to tell you how much more to scale, because you always want the max anyways. And you bankrupted the company building factories you didn't need, because iPhone demand has its limits.
- leeoniya 7y ago
  i mostly agree with you. great intuition and experience can largely reduce the need for metrics. the problem is that not every business decision is clear cut and people who have to make them are not always Jobs or Gates. what metrics give you is a way to give the average joe (which is most of us) a way to take calculated risks when there are multiple stakeholders each with their own opinion of what should be done. metrics - like statistics - can be used effectively as a guide or can be used obsessively like dogma.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

harlanji 7y ago

There is something about numbers that seems to push us into rational mode and totally subjugate the emotional side of us that does great without data, and allows for us to act in abundance. My best idea is to display something like standard deviation and a delta between actual and the target metric, perhaps as low resolution as green-yellow-red to the employee responsible for the metric. It may hypothetically be somebody's job it adjust the formula and never reveal more detail than that, in this scenario. A concrete example, if at a restaurant we expect meals to be delivered within 7 minutes and we see the nightly average is currently 8:08 then some team members might start pushing to go faster and cut corners, compromising discipline and training effort--even if the company's values include accuracy and precision above speed. The values are laid down by the visionary founders, but the only metric that the workers have is an exact number and target. Somewhere along the chain between founding and the last hands on the food the values can be lost, and I feel like chasing the metric has a lot to do with it. Everyone pushes to make the number "because" of some factor, in my opinion probably pressure from above or a colleague. Pardon me if I've abused any terms, thanks. The factor that I am sure of is entering scarcity mode rather than abundance mode, and I'd like to know more about how reading metrics affects us and whether there are known methods to systemically remove metrics from view such that we can remain true to all of the values outside of the metric. If we're short of a target then there is a gap in training or experience; nobody should be so driven by metrics that it overrides their acting in abundance. I know this can be said to be coming from fantasy land but I've come from working in a number of domains in a short period of time, I feel like there's something in here even if it's hard to find.

threeseed 7y ago

1. Steve Jobs didn't make the iPhone. 2. Apple has a very large Product Marketing team who do extensive quantitive and qualitative research on what products they should make, features should be delivered etc. This is the same for Microsoft, Facebook etc. I worked at Apple and each team will have a Product Owner/Program Manager assigned who decides what is done where as Engineers decide how it is done. 3. Data Scientists aren't solely responsible for releasing more iPhone models or how many ads to show. Those sort of decisions are cross-functional involving Finance, Product, Marketing, Strategy etc. 4. Data Scientists are basically engineers. They largely do what they are told to do by the "business". So not sure why you seem to think they are root of all evil.

jbob2000 7y ago
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees in my comment. I’m not really criticizing Data Science, the job function, but the field in general and the obsession over it. Your last point kind of weighs in on a point I didn’t quite get to; that data can be found to reinforce any decision. If business wants to do X, they will have the data scientists prove to them that X is good. Data can be a huge force of tyranny in this way, this is where my disdain for the field comes from.

sammorrowdrums 7y ago

You need both, I agree that given metrics don't predict the possible futures that depart significantly from the current state, you do need to support innovation without numbers to always back those ideas up. For every iPhone there is for example the wireless technology that powers the iPhone, which needed a huge amount of data driven decisions to get mobile masts in the right places, reliably send and receive data... The battery tech. Each of those innovations was the product of some good ideas combined with data and improvements that lead to the next innovations with countless failed innovations along the way. I think you place too much emphasis on the "genius" that combines these novel ideas, and I'm not saying it isn't required, but I think there's a lot of these ideas that die and a lot more data behind them than is talked about. For the iPhone to work it had to to be at a time where the tech was right, the price of components could enable it to be sold at an acceptable price-point, the UX had to be tested on countless people. To be more succinct, the right amount of optimisation, data driven improvement and innovation combine with the right timing. Ceaseless optimisation can lead a good product to become horrible, but you need numbers. Surely you can see the symbiosis between things like data driven battery improvement and optimisation and the possiblity of something like the iPhone. The iPhone would not exist without data driven decisions. It wouldn't exist without vision and risk taking either.

DrScientist 7y ago

Sure is was JFK that got us to the moon, not the scientists and engineers doing calculations, experiments and looking at the data. Both vision and drive and the ability to execute are essential. What happened at Apple was engineers came to Jobs with a prototype and he saw the potential and drove it relentlessly forward. Same for the Mac - he saw what Xerox had done and recognized the potential. Yes he trusted his own judgement - but I'd say if you saw either Xerox prototype in the age of terminals or a touch device in the age of fiddly keyboards it doesn't take a genius to see the potential - it just takes a hero ( courage ) to bet on it. Finally, on the dark arts of advertising, moving from the 'gut' to being data driven - sadly I'd say that's what has made it more effective as a tool.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> Finally, on the dark arts of advertising, moving from the 'gut' to being data driven - sadly I'd say that's what has made it more effective as a tool. Part of the reason metrics work so well in marketing is because a lot of accepted industry practices are inherently malicious acts towards other human beings. So unlike other optimization processes, you don't care all that much about side effects of optimizing to metrics. For instance - do customers hate your guts for your advertising spam? Doesn't matter - the product becomes associated with a strong emotion, making it more likely some of them will buy it few months from now. Mission accomplished.
- DrScientist 7y ago
  > do customers hate your guts for your advertising spam? > Doesn't matter - the product becomes associated with a strong emotion, making it more likely some of them will buy it few months from now. Interesting, does that really work? Got data you can point to, to back that one up? I take your broader point of them not really caring - we are seeing that in data driven politics in the UK right now. Obviously this host/parasite interaction will evolve - but at the moment it seems the population doesn't have many effective defenses. It's a bit like the opioid epidemic or obesity epidemic - currently people are being given the politics they apparently want.

k__ 7y ago

I'm not so sure. Sounds like a urban legend "idea guys" want to believe.

Nimitz14 7y ago

I agree with you. I feel a like optimizing metrics often leads to an overall worse product, but which, thanks to the actions of a minority of users who respond strongly to the change (while the rest grumble but don't change their behaviour much), gives the impression of having achieved an improvement.

6gvONxR4sf7o 7y ago

Did you think my post was smug? Because I'm saying what you're saying. I agree with you. My post was just to say it's a tough pill to swallow. Bitter medicine is still medicine. Except I wouldn't say data science is destroying our society. Maybe data science done the blind lazy way is, but shitty science isn't representative of good science.