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Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

twitchard.github.io

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Re: Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

#91

Post by czbond »

ekianjo wrote: post #42
shubb wrote: post #35

The related problem that I see actually more often is the "you don't have big data" problem. You know, in data science, you see people spending hours writing pandas scripts that replicate a few clicks in excel for a one of analysis. You see datasets of a few gigabytes being processed with spark when SQL would be fine. You see ML techniques being thrown at questions that could be answered simply and reliably with basi…

Talking to people is not going to help you either. You end up getting a lot of noise and making sense of what you hear is difficult. When you keep probing you will get to hear stuff thats not really critical and just often made up because you ask too many questions. Classical trap of market research.

While I agree with your suggested outcome for some or many, a product designer or manager who is skilled at asking questions, going deeper, removing distractions, asking why continuously, and empathizing while not seeming judgey can garner really good insights.

I am guessing it's like you see of a psychologist with a patient on TV..... the customer must feel comfortable enough to open up, then flood gates can open.

Re: Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

#92

Post by mannykannot »

viridian wrote: post #46

This entire discussion makes a good case for why the general populace would benefit from being taught the basics of philosophy. In this case the topic of value is the often fraught relationship between empiricism and rationalism , and the impacts each have on the scientific process, research, education, and how we go about understanding the world. To operate with one with a complete absence of the other is to expose…

While this is indeed an issue that falls within the domain of philosophy, philosophy is also home to fields in which the absence of empirical evidence is regarded as an irrelevance, or at best a mere detail that can be deferred to an indefinite future. Take, for example, the resurgence of enthusiasm for panpsychism, and the enduring appeal of armchair metaphysics.

I am doubtful that academic philosophy has much enthusiasm for pursuing and inculcating the practical aspects of reason (any more than does theoretical physics or mathematics), though there are exceptions.

Re: Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

#93

Post by oxfordmale »

tdehnel wrote: post #54
oxfordmale wrote: post #38

This is not what the data shows https://www.google.com/search?q=data+driven+companies+more+p... Any good-argument-driven based argument you attempt to make is almost always based on political motivating factors, rather on what is good for the business. Intuition driven decisions work when the market is behaving normally, however, are generally too slow in a fast changing market like we have been since the start of CO…

> Any good-argument-driven based argument you attempt to make is almost always based on political motivating factors If this is true in the case of a specific theory, then that is not a good theory.

I was mostly referring to business decisions. For that type of decisions there are always political factors at play (building empires, career growth, dislike for another person/team) that do not necessarily align with business success. Lehman Brothers is one of those examples.

Re: Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

#94

Post by jasode »

tdehnel wrote: post #55
jasode wrote: post #16

To the author... I'd suggest a rewrite of what you're trying to communicate because your usage of "good-argument-driven" is a textbook example of Begging The Question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question For discussion's sake, let's go along with excluding data/metrics/science in pushing for arguments. In this framework, what exactly is a "good" argument based on? Gut feel? Opinion? There was a famous…

A simple answer to this is that good explanations are hard to vary. More here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jcTsbaQ8hNc7qxwaQ/explanatio...

>A simple answer to this is that good explanations are hard to vary.

But the "hard to vary" explanations were built up from observing data of smashing particles. E.g. from your link:

- Frank Wilczek describes hard-to-vary-ness as follows "A theory begins to be perfect if any change makes it worse." He explains further using the Standard Model as an example of a hard-to-vary explanation: Too many gluons! But each of the eight colour gluons is there for a purpose. Together, they fulfil complete symmetry among the color charges. [...] No fudge factors or tweaks are available.

This author's blog post about "data" also links to his previous post[1] about "science" leading one astray from "good arguments" is the opposite of "hard to vary" explanations.

Here's the reason for the disconnect: The author is using the adjective "good" in his idiosyncratic way to describe the type of arguments that depend more on "storytelling" and "intrinsic motivation" -- rather than empirical science/data. Excerpt:

- >And here is a secret: in the natural sciences themselves, storytelling and bare conjecture are far more important modes of persuasion than data-based empirical argument, anyway. [...]

- >A good example of the sort of argument I think is helpful is A Philosophy of Software Design. Ousterhout defines his terms clearly, accompanies his definitions and claims with illustrative examples, and tells an occasional story. You, the reader, are free to evaluate each claim based on whether it plausibly seems to capture the essence of what you have encountered in your experiences writing software. For my part, I didn’t find most of Ousterhout’s ideas to be persuasive, as some of my colleagues did, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t good arguments,

Those types of subjective claims arguments the author is espousing are actually "easy to vary" -- because they don't require constructing a cohesive theory that reconciles data that looks contradictory (e.g. like the The Standard Model, or Theory of General Relativity reconciling the speed-of-light observations).

[1] http://twitchard.github.io/posts/2019-10-13-software-develop...

Re: Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

#95

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

Great article, but I think it somewhat misunderstands the impetus for the concept. "Data has its place" sounds obvious precisely because "data-driven" has been such a successful concept. The alternative perspective, which used to be very common in our industry and still pops up from time to time, is that metrics are something you write for debugging and business decisions are made by gut feeling or abstract philosophical analysis. (Most software companies had to make decisions this way in the pre-cloud era, because it wasn't usually feasible to collect usage metrics.)

Re: Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

#96

Post by sopooneo »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #82
ekianjo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking to people is not going to help you either. You end up getting a lot of noise and making sense of what you hear is difficult. When you keep probing you will get to hear stuff thats not really critical and just often made up because you ask too many questions. Classical trap of market research.

ycombinator startup school disagrees and says it's one of the two CRITICAL things founders must have a hand in. Of course you need to interpret it but its incredibly important and I do not think you really know what you are talking about. https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6g-how-to-talk-to-users Almost all the major fails I have seen in my career have been some derivative of not understanding your users.

At the very least, I feel talking to users will give you decent hypothesis to test.

The creation of hypothesis is often glossed over as a trivial first step in scientific or data-driven decision making, but in fact, that's where the magic lives.

Re: Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

#97

Post by thiele »

dxbydt wrote: post #84
shubb wrote: post #35

The related problem that I see actually more often is the "you don't have big data" problem. You know, in data science, you see people spending hours writing pandas scripts that replicate a few clicks in excel for a one of analysis. You see datasets of a few gigabytes being processed with spark when SQL would be fine. You see ML techniques being thrown at questions that could be answered simply and reliably with basi…

frankly, there’s only a tiny handful of these mythical saas “1000 users each paying 1 mullion dollars” companies. the vast, vast majority of saas startups are serving millions of “users” - i put that in quotes because these aren’t real users or customers. they are real people checking out your product - but they aren’t users or customers. if you set up a gas station near the off ramp of some major interstate, say I-6…

This is a really good analogy (gas station customers) that I haven’t heard before. I’ve often tried to describe this ‘low intent’ group but never had a good way to make it relatable.

Re: Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

#98

Post by orangepurple »

ramesh31 wrote: post #87
k__ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you say the big data threshold moves every year? That would explain why people think a <1TB is big data.

>Would you say the big data threshold moves every year? It moves with Moore's law. Big data is anything that cannot reasonably fit into memory for a single server, so yes that number is well over 1TB now.

I know this isn't the correct definition but I think of "big data" as the set of data which takes me more than 15 minutes to query on average with a moderately complex Postgres SQL join on well indexed information. I use JSONB in Postgres regularly and have indices on that too. So far I have gotten really far with increasing Postgres work_mem to a gig or more, a fast SSD, and strategically placed materialized views. These kinds of operations in Pandas make my computer billow smoke by comparison.

Re: Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

#99

Post by Razengan »

viridian wrote: post #46

This entire discussion makes a good case for why the general populace would benefit from being taught the basics of philosophy. In this case the topic of value is the often fraught relationship between empiricism and rationalism , and the impacts each have on the scientific process, research, education, and how we go about understanding the world. To operate with one with a complete absence of the other is to expose…

> This entire discussion makes a good case for why the general populace would benefit from being taught the basics of philosophy.

But our entire education pipeline is optimized for loading people into the “system”. Philosophy etc. has little market value (unless it aligns with the system).

Re: Be good-argument-driven, not data-driven

#100

Post by derefr »

dxbydt wrote: post #84
shubb wrote: post #35

The related problem that I see actually more often is the "you don't have big data" problem. You know, in data science, you see people spending hours writing pandas scripts that replicate a few clicks in excel for a one of analysis. You see datasets of a few gigabytes being processed with spark when SQL would be fine. You see ML techniques being thrown at questions that could be answered simply and reliably with basi…

frankly, there’s only a tiny handful of these mythical saas “1000 users each paying 1 mullion dollars” companies. the vast, vast majority of saas startups are serving millions of “users” - i put that in quotes because these aren’t real users or customers. they are real people checking out your product - but they aren’t users or customers. if you set up a gas station near the off ramp of some major interstate, say I-6…

Even more problematically, if you have a free service that could attract any kind of automation (e.g. an API SaaS with a free trial) then you're also going to get a lot of "users" who seem to be the "truck drivers" given a black-box usage profile, but who will also never actually convert. They use some free part of your service a lot, but they're not and never will be interested in any paid part of your service.

Maybe a close analogy would be: truck drivers who stop at your rest stop every time they come by... just to use the washroom. But who never go into the store itself.

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