[gwern]

> He even closes the article with the following: > >> Your time may better spent getting in there and trying things rather than reading about what other people think.

But collectively, those people have spent a lot more time on the technologies, in many more situations, than I have used them or am likely to use them. How am I better off ignoring them and throwing away data? How does listening to them make me worse off?

When I was looking at statistics languages, I didn't spend a year trying Stata, a year trying SAS, a year trying Julia, a year trying Matlab, a year trying Panda+Python, a year trying R; I just looked at what people were using and blogging about and opinions on them, and picked R. How would I have been better off ignoring all of the community discussions and picking on my own? What systematic tendency causes the discussions to be literally worse than random noise?

[dllthomas]

The passage you quote doesn't say "worse than random noise", it says "worse than trying it out". I'm not sure that's true but it is a substantially weaker claim.