[bamfly]

Big (and small) companies routinely make "data-driven decisions" based on obviously-faulty data collection, bad models, or misapplication of statistics. It rarely takes some crack scientific mind to spot it, either. But they want a decision now and doing it right might take a lot longer or cost more, or the correct model might be a lot fuzzier and that makes them uncomfortable, or they've got some notion in their heads already and they'll be damned if mere numbers are going to get in the way of that, so everyone in the room's just supposed to nod along when the blatantly-biased graphs come up on the Power Point suggesting (erroneously) that we do X.

The business world runs at least as much on bullshit as the most cynical among us might think, I'd say. It's not half as clever or competently-run as one might hope, certainly.

It's a cliche that front-line workers have a better understanding of customers and products than the c-suite and that this leads to predictable blunders, because that's often true.

(I'm also not sure I'd call Reddit a "giant corp", but that's beside the point [EDIT] and anyway, to be fair, this particular discussion isn't just concerned with Reddit)

[xorcist]

Often the decision is already made. The numbers game is how you sell the decision internally.