Data And Decision Making

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The underlying assumption in data-based decision making is that the future will be the continuation of the past. The big companies have all the data in the world and somehow meaningful innovation comes out of startups which are based on the founders' believes, intuition, or curiosity. All data is about the past including the data about the future, which is more of an opinion than fact. Does that mean we ignore data? No. Understand the data about the data. Where does it come from? When and how it was collected? Is it showing causation? Do we understand the interconnectedness of all variables? etc. And then, use data as one of the inputs in decision making. 

Was controlled fire invented based on data? :) 


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