David Brooks says people like me “ignore intuition and follow the data.”
David Brooks doesn’t know me very well.
I read his piece, and my intuition told me I hated it. The difference between us is what I did next: I read it again, then again, trying to figure out why I felt so strongly. Then, knowing that my instinctive dislike was likely to cloud my judgment, I passed it to a friend who has no particular interest in data and no stake in data science. This friend is smart, and I knew he would read what was on the page and think critically about the ideas behind it.
“Tell me what you think about this,” I said.
He read it and answered, “It’s a lot of quotes and doesn’t say anything. You hate it, don’t you?”
Yes, I hated it. I hated this piece that seemed to agree with everyone who’s extolling the value of my rare skill set. I hate it because there is nothing wrong with any individual statement in that article—except that they add up to nothing. Brooks skillfully co-opts analyses from other experts and rounds them up in a tidy little knot that demonstrates his authority without forcing him to plant his flag anywhere. Where I formed a hypothesis and looked for ways to disprove it, Brooks accepted all hypotheses at once and built a little ancedata fortress around his opinion. That’s the reasonable thing for him to do because in his world he doesn’t have to prove or disprove anything he says. Brooks is from the era where the size of his audience and the power of his amplifier automatically provide him with authority. He doesn’t have to say anything—In fact, he’s better off if he doesn’t.
If there is a danger to the data revolution, it’s people like David Brooks—people who spot a new thing, see that it’s useful, and immediately muscle in to tell the rest of us how to do it. Their personal experience reigns supreme over any experiment, any contradictory facts, any empirical evidence that they’re wrong. They yell about the superiority of their intuition, and present their good luck as proof of their prowess. These are the highest paid persons in the office. They are the self-designated “thought leaders” who lead us nowhere. They are the “experts” who prattle on and on in meetings sounding clever and offering no information. They get to that spot through various methods—some of it scheming, some of it skill at a particular thing, or just the random good luck that probability theory tells us will put someone on top no matter how level the original playing field.
More than anything, I hate this article because it commits a cardinal sin of analysis: It takes a plural of anecdotes and treats them as data. Brooks quotes 8 studies—each of which presents pages of evidence and explanation. He sums up each in a paragraph or two. He quotes no studies where poor data preparation leads to erroneous results, no incomplete models that produce spurious correlations, no poorly-interpreted analyses that led to bad decisions. That isn’t in his thesis, so he doesn’t bother with it. Like every other HIPP, he builds his case to support his position. If it’s no real position, so much the better—he can’t be accused of misleading anyone.
Brooks claims we’re telling him to “ignore intuition and follow the data.” We’re not. We’re telling him to look at all the data, not just cherry pick whatever fits his confirmation bias. We’re creating ways push all the information to the forefront so whatever contradicts his already-formed opinion can’t be ignored.
I can see why that would be scary. Brooks and people like him have told the rest of us what to think for a long time. His elevated position, obtained partly by the quality of his work but mostly by his access to a bigger microphone, gives him a certain amount of power. He’s so used to this state of affairs, he doesn’t even understand that the game has changed.
Information is becoming democratized, and people with the skill set necessary to extract meaning from that information are going to replace the David Brookses of the world. I can only hope that day comes sooner rather than later.
One of his quoted researchers was my dissertation advisor (Jamie Pennebaker). You’re right — he is dramatically oversimplifying that body of research for a few choice morsels of sound bite. But then, that’s how all popular media presents research.
(and that doesn’t make it any less irritating)
It’s apparently bloviating pontificators whose personal experience outweighs all fact & logic week on the Internet. My sympathies…
Really, every day is bloviating pontificators whose personal experience outweighs all fact and logic day on the internet. I should be used to it.
I just don’t want it to be their day in the board room, or on the senate floor, or in the White House. I think in those places every day should be “Let’s think about this logically and make decisions based on facts day.”
Hrm…Maybe I should propose one of those for the internet. It could be my own “Talk Like a Pirate Day”.
So, how do you really feel about it?
Sir, you will never have to ask me that question.
Oh, we’re going to get along fine.
Wow! I’m taken with the heat of the argument here. As an “intuitive” – a surgeon, I frequently “intuited” a significant change in my patients’ status, for better and for worse, several hours before the “data” manifested a change – I have to say that my take on the Brooks piece was simpler. To me, his argument boiled down to “Data are fine, but let’s not neglect / ignore / denigrate the role of intuition in figuring things out”. Or, more forcefully put, maybe, “Let’s not make a Religion / dogma out of our belief that data are the solution to all problems”.
I would reverse that and say “Intuition is fine, but it’s been a religion and a dogma for far too long.”
Thank you joining the conversation!
“…but it (intuition) has been a religion and a dogma for far too long.” — Which is not being argued, as far as I am aware.
As far as I know, the current situation is that we are far from the state of blindly following intuition, and are actually wholly relying on data for almost everything. Brooks — in my understanding — is suggesting to abstain from this over-reliance on data and to trust intuition, and that too in particular cases.
Correct me if I am wrong.
I don’t think it’s so much that you’re wrong as that we’re seeing the situation very differently.
In my experience, it is very common to present thoughtful, data-driven analysis to people who said they wanted to know the facts and have them blow me off when the numbers didn’t agree with their “intuition.” If you saw Karl Rove’s reaction when the quants at Fox News called the last election for Obama, that is a prime example of what I’m talking about. Brooks himself, in his latest piece, cites a CEO who decided to continue doing business in Italy, despite the drastically bad performance numbers because he didn’t want to be seen as a “fair weather friend”. Now, that might turn out to be a good business decision in the long run (I’m skeptical), but the fact his, he blew off the data and went with his “gut.”
There are a lot of people who say they’re following data when they’re really just cherry picking numbers that support what they wanted to do. There were plenty of people who saw the financial crisis coming as early as 2004 (Michael Lewis tells their story in The Big Short). There were people within the big banks who knew housing prices were unsustainable as early as 2004, and they were shouted down by higher-paid people who had better “gut” instincts.
The conservatives in the U.S. say they want to end abortions, so they want to make abortions illegal, yet there are plenty of studies that show making abortion illegal has a much smaller effect than providing health care and services to single mothers. However, the people who say that stopping abortion is their top priority are cutting health care and social services benefits http://abcnews.go.com/Business/WomensHealth/story?id=5293543&page=1 because they “know what’s right.”
So, while a lot of people may pay lip service to logic and data-driven decisions, they’re not. These are the same people yelling “data can’t do everything” after Nate Silver showed, unequivocally, that careful statistical analysis beats even the best-informed political pundit. It’s disingenuous, and it’s also clouding a discussion that has the potential to illuminate many of our country’s ills.
And thank you for commenting! I really appreciate you taking the time to ask a question.