[nonrandomstring]

The direct, old-fashioned approach of;

  - being real

  - talking to customers

  - actually listening to what people say

  - using intuition

  - cutting to the chase (big and meta problems first)

  - doing risky exploration for abductive reasoning 

is only as good as the nominal culture we're in. As the author says,

> I’m no longer a believer in decision-by-spreadsheet.

That's nice for you. Me neither. But every day we must interact with dull-headed data crunchers who set the pace and policy.

[hef19898]

All of the above needs some basis in reality, aka numbers. Otherwise it is just guess work.

[nonrandomstring]

What do you think is wrong with guess work?

[hef19898]

That you are as often wrong as you are right? If you have numbers, good ones, use them during decision finding.

[nonrandomstring]

50/50? For terrible guessers maybe.

For experts with tens of thousands of hours experience in a specialised field, with 40 years of case studies to extrapolate from?

Let's cast it in more relatable terms:

Such a person is, an enormous collection of data.

The day will come... soon, when people who "believe in technology" (in the very strong sense) will see no problem putting absolute trust in a neural network trained on exactly that same corpus of data.

A neural network is of course, a magnificent black box statistics machine.

And what are statistics machines trained on? Numbers. But they process and relate to them in a fuzzy way.

What is a spreadsheet and data analytics suite? Numbers.

Now your human specialist is going to outperform the numbers machine every time. But the human can often not introspect their ineffable knowledge (most expert knowledge is like that; which is why we developed the entire filed of expert systems to make it legible)

So if we choose to call such knowledge "feelings" of "guesswork" we're making a silly mistake. What does that even mean?

Neither can the neural network introspect. But we choose to label that ineffable knowledge as "calculation".

And so you invoke the magical properties of "NUmbers!" (did you mean real or imaginary ones :)

You see the error we fall into, giving two different labels to the same process only because of what hardware they execute on?

What I'd really like to talk about is the logical process of discovery called "abduction", but I fear I am rambling already :)

[hef19898]

I consider myself to be rather good in my field. Which is exactly why I take every bit of data I can get before I provide my opinion or decide something.

Every situation is different, facts change, so I have to evaluate my opinion each and every time (which is hownypu learn and bevome better). And the more data I have, the easier this is.

[nonrandomstring]

Like me, you opine and decide. Sounds like you and I are both experts who take advantage of all the tools in the box, numerical, computational and messy wetware. Sorry if you may have taken umbrage with my depiction of "dull headed data slaves". What I was referring to there are people who only use the numbers. For them there are no opinions or decisions. Only calculations. And as per TFA, it is that mentality that stymies innovation and good decision making.