Nate Silver Interview At HBR Blogs

HBR Blogs has interviewed Nate Silver on analytics, building a career in analytics and how organizations should manage analytics. I agree with his views on pretty much everything. Some money quotes:

HBR: Say an organization brings in a bunch of ‘stat heads’ to use your terminology. Do you silo them in their own department that serves the rest of the company? Or is it important to make sure that every team has someone who has the analytic toolkit to pair with expertise?

Silver: I think you want to integrate it as much as possible. That means that they’re going to have some business skills, too, right? And learn that presenting their work is important. But you need it to be integrated into the fabric of the organization.

And this:

Silver: If you can’t present your ideas to at least a modestly larger audience, then it’s not going to do you very much good. Einstein supposedly said that I don’t trust any physics theory that can’t be explained to a 10-year-old. A lot of times the intuitions behind things aren’t really all that complicated. In Moneyball that on-base percentage is better than batting average looks like ‘OK, well, the goal is to score runs. The first step in scoring runs is getting on base, so let’s have a statistic that measures getting on base instead of just one type of getting on base.’ Not that hard a battle to fight.

And this:

Silver: A lot of times when data isn’t very reliable, intuition isn’t very reliable either. The problem is people see it as an either/or, when it sometimes is both or neither, as well. The question should be how good is a model relative to our spitball, gut-feel approach.

Go on and read the whole interview.

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