[mindcrime]

> it will be an engine for simply manufacturing support for a pre-selected option.

There's nothing unique about this tool in that regard though. Pretty much anything can be mis-used in that way - spreadsheets, graphics/visualizations, statistical models, etc. etc. Whether tools are actually used to support better decision making, or simply to support pre-selected decisions, is more about the culture of the organization and the mind-set of its leaders.

[dragonwriter]

> There's nothing unique about this tool in that regard though.

Sure, it’s just part of an arms race where having a new thing with a hot selling pitch to cover that up and put a layer of buzzwords on top of it helps sell the results to audiences who have started to see through the existing ways of doing that.

[mindcrime]

I agree in general. I'm just not sure how much the "new thing with a hot selling pitch" part even matters. At least IME, at companies where the culture is such that management just look for ways to add a sheen of scientific respectability to their ad-hoc decisions, nobody really questions the details. Management just put the "thing" out there, hand-wave some "blah, blah" around, everybody nods their heads, and things proceed as they were always going to.

[A4ET8a8uTh0]

Agreed. At the end of the day, it is just another tool.

I think the issue is the human tendency to just rubber stamp whatever result is given. Not that long ago, few questioned the result of a study and now there won't even be underlying data to go back to see if someone made an error. Naturally, this would suggest that we will start seeing a lot of bad decisions, because human operators did not stop and think whether the response made sense.

That said, I am not sure what can be done about it.