It's Time to Stop with all the Data Driven Decision Making

I have written (somewhat) critically in the past about so called data-driven decision making. In that previous piece I began by saying

In life, and especially in business it is quite fashionable these days to hear people claim that they make "data driven decisions." Making data driven decision sounds like a very smart thing to do. Certainly much smarter than its regular language translation, "using the facts to determine a course of action" which sounds awfully obvious and boring. Definitely not something one would see published in the Harvard Business Review. Despite its obviousness it would seem hard to argue with the sagacity of making "data driven decisions", after all who would not want to use all of the information at one's disposal (data) in deciding which to select of the many possible alternative options that are available (decision making) for doing whatever it is one is trying to do?

I went on to describe two highly relevant downsides that can make data driven decision making a less than optimal mechanism for deciding things. However, I qualified those criticisms by stating the obvious

Even if less than optimal in some specific instances, it is still likely never a bad way to make a decision, it just won't guarantee that you always come out on top. Nothing ever does though does it?

That piece garnered something like ten reads, which is actually on the high side for one of my posts. I called it a success and moved on to bigger and better things. Satirical fake news articles featuring argan oil, and <600 word think pieces published in the Poets community because Vocal still insists on their ridiculous and arbitrary word count minimum for story publication elsewhere. You know, the kinds of posts that get at least five reads before sinking into the black hole of the internet never to be seen nor heard from again. In other words, my raison d'etre.

That was two years ago and since that time the hype surrounding data driven decision making has continued on unabated. My LinkedIn feed is constantly inundated with advertisements and promos for courses and resources devoted to the topic. See below for just one recent example.

Not at all unexpectedly data driven decision making has teamed up with two of the kings of techno-hype, data science (the non-science, science) and machine learning (the term made up of two words that when combined in that order result in a logical contradiction and thus a thing which cannot be. If a machine could learn it would no longer be a machine.) Nonetheless, despite my over a half decade of bitching and moaning about it, both data science and machine learning are now part of the lexicon and are apparently not going anywhere. By contrast, data driven decision making is a relative newcomer to the hype scene. Therefore, proponents (i.e. those poised to make gobs of cash) off of this most obvious of decision making strategies are smart to latch on to two of the undisputed champions of hype as a way to bolster their own claims to legitimacy, and to increase the fatness of their wallets.

Once again it falls to me to point out the ridiculousness at the heart of the entire data driven decision making hype enterprise. What irks me so greatly has nothing to do with the sagacity of data driven decision making as a process for making decisions. As I written in the past, and copy pasted again above, data driven decision making is a very smart way to decide things. In fact, in almost every case, it is by far the smartest way to decide things. My problem is with the way that most obvious of statements is treated as if it is some sort of revelation handed down from the elder business Gods of old. Or, as if it is the most clever and novel concept yet conceived of by (business)man. It brings to mind the picture of two wildly successful CEO-types walking side by side down the marble gilded hallways of their palatial Park Avenue office talking in hushed whispers about the great secret that has finally been discovered. Excitedly exchanging congratulatory words describing how they they will finally have the one tool needed to vanquish their competitive foes and rule the (business) world like the great kings of the ancient past. All they need do is begin making decisions using all of the information available (data), instead of just wild ass guessing or going on hunches like they had done up until they learned of this amazing new approach to choosing among various alternatives. In reality, these imagined CEO types have been making data driven decisions their entire lives, both in business and in life outside of work. Exactly as almost everyone has. The main difference today is the availability of more data, and the existence of ever more sophisticated tools to analyze it. And so we come full circle to our non-scientist data scientist friends and their tool of choice, the logical contradiction that is machine learning. It turns out that data "scientists" are experts at data driven decision making, and that one particularly popular tool for gathering and analyzing data is machine "learning." The circle of hype is now complete. I can return to my cryogenic freezer and emerge again five years hence to point out the stupidity of the next great bus-tech hype obsession, super deep learning. Featuring legendary hip hop icon Ice-Cube as the face of super deep learning. Learning so deep it puts your ass to sleep. Yeah!