I’d value your thoughts. I just wrote a fairly rambling post about my frustration at how we ignore data in favor of superstition, and that could lead to stuff like, oh, the collapse of modern society.
I think on a personal level, there’s room for us to use data in our lives where we just don’t do it, yet life would be a lot better if we did.
Example #1, data about what’s going on in others’ heads: I “knew” Tom S hated me in high school. I never thought to ask him or find out, I just decided it, based on the way he treated me. One day we were assigned to work together on a project, I called his house, and his mother said, “Oh! You’re the boy he admires so much.” I was floored. Tom and I ended up becoming friends.
Example #2, retirement planning: after the March 2000 market crash, a friend was re-evaluating her retirement plans. Numerically, she could only meet her goals in the stock market by getting 15%+ returns for over 15 years. She thought it unlikely and began finding other ways to finance her retirement and diversified into other investments.
- Is this a good topic for the book?
- Do you have any examples of how you’ve used data to reach contrary or surprising conclusions?
2 responses so far ↓
1 Steve Parker // Apr 21, 2008 at 11:11 pm
I think it would be a great addition to the book. I tend to over-analyze everything, but I can’t think of specific times when I came to a surprising conclusion. The more data I accumulate when making a decision, the more confident I am about my conclusion. My family thinks I overdo it. When I bought my car, I test-drove and researched every car in my price range before choosing. My parents, on the other hand, decide to buy a car and do so that day, or within the week. Actually, my car buying decision was surprising. I decided on a Ford Focus ZX5 after having voiced before that I would never own a Ford or GM vehicle. I am still happy with my decision, while my dad is already bored with his truck, which he got after I bought the Focus.
P.S. The guy I “knew” hated me in high school actually made threats on my well being. Recently, I ran into him in a mall parking lot. We talked like old friends. Life is odd…
2 Steve Mills // Apr 30, 2008 at 8:33 am
I once made a startling decision by using data. We were trying to choose a beta customer for a new product and just “knew” it must *not* be powerful but troublesome customer X.
We made a mindmap of potential customers. We used an add-on tool that let us state what the evalutation criteria would be and what weight each would carry. We evaluated all of our best candidates, and we included as many odd balls as we could including customer X.
Guess what: customer X came out top. We reviewed the criteria to see why they had come out top, but could not fault the criteria.
When we approached customer X to be our beta customer they asked how come we had chosen them. So we deployed honesty and showed them the evaluation map.
To our surprise they were impressed and went on to conduct an excellent beta project with us.
Kind Regards
Steve
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