[throwaway0asd]

A major exception to this reasoning is performance. Argument driven performance suggestions are wrong more than 80% of the time and likely wrong by several orders of magnitude. You can’t know just how wrong you are without appropriate data.

This makes for a good litmus test of whether people are lying to you about software or, more likely, have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

[NateEag]

Performance falls into the article's category of "things you can reliably measure."

Thus, the author would agree that in performance optimization, you should collect and analyze data.

[throwaway0asd]

The problem isn’t what the article author believes, but rather what developers commonly (perhaps almost universally) believe.

Most developers will fall back to intuition for any performance oriented decision even when they otherwise prefer data oriented decisions and even when the task at hand is critical to the health of their product/business. This is because performance measures require:

1. Additional effort

2. (most importantly) A willingness to abandon familiar concepts of approach

Sometimes such decisions vested in intuition are truth by omission, a form of lying, because the resulting self-comfort is worth more than the numeric benefits.