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0 pointsmindcrime1y ago0 comments

> 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.

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dragonwriter1y ago

> 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.

mindcrimeOP1y ago

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.

A4ET8a8uTh01y ago

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.

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