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?
