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That's a great thing to note. Correlation definitely does not indicate causation. In a perfect world, we'd have one group of companies employ the Great by Choic

That's a great thing to note. Correlation definitely does not indicate causation. In a perfect world, we'd have one group of companies employ the Great by Choice practices, and in another we employ a different set of practices. However, that's not really possible. The point about the other companies is less relevant because companies do change and stop doing all the things that make the great. The Good to Great companies had 15+ years of sustained success - doesn't mean they will be amazing forever. Similarly, just because Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't as ripped as he used to be doesn't mean that lifting heavy weights and eating a lot won't make you gain muscle.

jacobolus 15y ago
Yeah, but the point is that “success” depends on a huge number of factors, and a post-hoc ethnographic analysis isn’t necessarily going to pick out what the real differences were. It’s quite easy to fool ourselves, as Feynman describes. Even if you had an economy where all companies were managed identically, the sheer number of companies would lead some of them to be successful for 15 years in a row, and others to go out of business right away. Looking at past history and trying to sift through it for patterns is a great way to form hypotheses and questions for further research, but it’s entirely unscientific to claim those patterns are causal without setting up a new experiment. To take your Schwarzenegger example, we can tell that lifting weights and taking steroids builds muscles because we’ve run the experiment where we take two otherwise identical groups of people, and give one steroids, and then observe the difference going forward. If we only look post-hoc, we might come up with entirely irrelevant patterns, for example finding differences in the amount of time successful bodybuilders spend socializing or watching TV or the number of herbal supplements they take or the kinds of houses they live in, &c. when compared to the general public. Anyhow, I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t try to do ethnographic and historical analyses (my father is an anthropologist/historian!), only that we need to be cautious and skeptical of our conclusions.

jacobolus 15y ago

Yeah, but the point is that “success” depends on a huge number of factors, and a post-hoc ethnographic analysis isn’t necessarily going to pick out what the real differences were. It’s quite easy to fool ourselves, as Feynman describes. Even if you had an economy where all companies were managed identically, the sheer number of companies would lead some of them to be successful for 15 years in a row, and others to go out of business right away. Looking at past history and trying to sift through it for patterns is a great way to form hypotheses and questions for further research, but it’s entirely unscientific to claim those patterns are causal without setting up a new experiment. To take your Schwarzenegger example, we can tell that lifting weights and taking steroids builds muscles because we’ve run the experiment where we take two otherwise identical groups of people, and give one steroids, and then observe the difference going forward. If we only look post-hoc, we might come up with entirely irrelevant patterns, for example finding differences in the amount of time successful bodybuilders spend socializing or watching TV or the number of herbal supplements they take or the kinds of houses they live in, &c. when compared to the general public. Anyhow, I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t try to do ethnographic and historical analyses (my father is an anthropologist/historian!), only that we need to be cautious and skeptical of our conclusions.