{"id":61562,"date":"2016-12-29T11:00:37","date_gmt":"2016-12-29T17:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=61562"},"modified":"2016-12-29T11:09:53","modified_gmt":"2016-12-29T17:09:53","slug":"what-is-best-in-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=61562","title":{"rendered":"What Is Best In Life?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the TV series\u00a0MASH,\u00a0<\/em>there was an episode featuring\u00a0a statistician – an Army officer who predicted how many men would be killed or wounded given the parameters of an upcoming battle. \u00a0 \u00a0To the statistician character, it was all about numbers – “just business, nothing personal”, to invoke a line from a different seventies production. \u00a0To surgeon Hawkeye Pierce, the character who had to try to patch together the actual men behind the numbers, is was in fact personal.<\/p>\n

At the end of the episode, losing his temper at the statistician, after showing the geek through the operating room, Pierce yells “the thing I hate about you isn’t that you’re good at your job. \u00a0I hate you for liking it so much”.<\/p>\n

I have a similar reaction to people who try to boil all human behavior down into numbers, statistics and analytical models.<\/p>\n

If blogs existed 50-60 years ago, a story like this would be accompanied by a photo like this. Good thing this is 2016, right?<\/p><\/div>\n

Now, before you launch into some misguided jape about conservatives hating science, remember – part of my day job is, well, boiling down human behavior into numbers, stats and patterns. \u00a0A bigger part, at least for me, is finding the qualitative answer behind the numbers.<\/p>\n

But I digress. \u00a0Among the many joys of this past election – the potential for a safe SCOTUS, a solid cabinet, no Hillary, no leasing of US foreign policy to the Saudis and Qataris – was the complete collapse of analytics in predicting (and, via our media, shaping) this past election<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The ana\u00adlyt\u00adic\u00adal mod\u00adels for both sides poin\u00adted to a Clin\u00adton vic\u00adtory, al\u00adbeit not a run\u00adaway. The Clin\u00adton cam\u00adpaign and su\u00adper PACs had sev\u00ader\u00adal of the most highly re\u00adgarded polling firms in the Demo\u00adcrat\u00adic Party, yet in the places that ended up mat\u00adter\u00ading, very little if any polling was done. So while 2016 wasn\u2019t a vic\u00adtory for tra\u00addi\u00adtion\u00adal polling, it cer\u00adtainly took a lot of the luster from ana\u00adlyt\u00adics. In the end, big data mattered very little.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While tinkering with stats can be fun, I’ve long loathed notion that all of human behavior can be boiled down into numbers. \u00a0 And I’ll admit, the\u00a0schadenfreud\u00a0<\/em>when the geeks fail to do so is glorious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the TV series\u00a0MASH,\u00a0there was an episode featuring\u00a0a statistician – an Army officer who predicted how many men would be killed or wounded given the parameters of an upcoming battle. \u00a0 \u00a0To the statistician character, it was all about numbers – “just business, nothing personal”, to invoke a line from a different seventies production. \u00a0To […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-great-poll-scam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61562"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61569,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61562\/revisions\/61569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}