[doctorpangloss]

> that scientific rigour will help you avoid the need for good judgement

This is what all big company PMs and directors of engineering believe. But their judgement (good or bad), their metrics (scientific or pseudoscientific), their career trajectory (up or out), whether these are known or unknown in the first place, and their actual material success: who knows how correlated it all is. They don’t have the words to express this stuff, so they wouldn’t be able to see the difference between science and pseudoscience for example, and you'd have a hard time communicating this thing about science to these people.

So while you are right, it’s not saying much that the real problem is communications, and that is the mainstream opinion of people who study microeconomics / the structure of firms. Put differently, people have built cathedrals of bullshit in their minds in service of the status quo where they “test” “everything” in lieu of having falsifiable, forward-looking opinions (aka judgement). You can’t just go, Martin Luther all of corporate white collar bureaucracy.