Dancing monkeys, hippos and angry men
Apparently there is enough digital data in the world to fill a stack of DVDs that would reach from the Earth to the moon and back again five times!! Really…was my first reaction and then secondly what is being done with all this data.
Data is here for us to learn from but it all depends on interpretation. We are told by our tutors to take emotion out of the decision making process. Avinash Kaushik talks about hippos being in the boardroom. He says hippos are disconnected with reality and it’s the person with the highest salary that makes the decision. If they say you should have a dancing monkey that’s what happens, as no one can disagree with a hippo unless you prove it through testing.
I recently saw Twelve Angry Men at the theatre and a play which in my opinion illustrates beautifully the interpretation of data/evidence. Set in 1957 it concerns the deliberations of a jury in a homicide trial.
The preliminary vote shows they have a nearly unanimous decision of guilty with one dissenter who throughout the play sows a seed of reasonable doubt. It is this one sole dissenter who skilfully interprets the evidence and events surrounding the murder to convince other jurors to doubt their original opinion. Why is he so skilful? He creates hypothesises then tests them in the confinements of the deliberation room. He sums up his fellow jurors presenting arguments that resonate for the unflappable, analytical stockbroker to the young man from a violent slum. He allows other to draw their conclusions first and then convince themselves that the suspect is not guilty. Eventually other jurors add weight to the argument of not guilty and a unanimous decision of not guilty is returned.
It is not about data it is about interpretation. Data can just sit on stacks of DVDs reaching the moon. Data needs people to set hypothesises to sift through data. It is people who test, learn and fail because of it. Avinash Kaushik says we need to embrace experimentation and the great companies on the internet learn to fail faster. They are simply flawsome.












