[upquark]

Lots of ignorance in the article and some of the comments regarding data-driven decision making. Does the author realize how much of the civilization around us is built and guided by data-driven decisions? Also, people/companies not being able to effectively use their measurements to their advantage is not really evidence against the idea itself. When your model doesn't work, it's not modeling that's broken, it's just your model.

Gut reactions can take us only so far: they break down as we move away from single human-scale familiar problems (ones that the brain has some built-in, evolved capacity of handling, such as reading other people's facial expressions).

[crimsonalucard]

Do you realize how much of civilization was built through intuition?

As great as data is, it is also limited. Why? Because we can never gather enough data. All our data is just a simplification of what's actually going on.

Essentially we're just grabbing data that's generated by black-box tests on systems that are astronomically more complex then we can comprehend. In many cases the data tells only a fraction of the story. It's akin to some alien race trying to understand the a computer desktop by measuring the electrical inputs on a usb port and seeing how that effects the voltage output of the hdmi port.

--

Here's a telling example of the power of intuition by a quote from steve jobs responding to Marc Andreessen inquiring about the "critical" problem the iphone had of "not having a physical keyboard.":

‘They’ll get used to it.’

Any datapoint you gathered on keyboards back in the day would have told you otherwise!

[jmtulloss]

I pretty much agree with you 100%, but I hate it when people use Steve Jobs quotes. He was better at this than almost anybody else, the rest of us need some help and some luck.