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Google has done a fantastic job of using data to make decisions. In fact so much so, that some think they may go overboard trying to find an algorithm for everything. My dinner with Sergey:
Sergey’s desire to reduce every decision to an equation would cause me a fair amount of frustration in the years to come. While it forced a discipline on me that was likely lacking in my career up to that point, it also went against my deeply-held conviction that some things are not expressible simply by deriving the correct algorithm. A lot of engineers at Google would dispute that with religious conviction, though they might admit that deriving the correct algorithm would be “non-trivial.”
I believe you can’t measure everything that is important. I also believe in most organizations the amount of stuff you can’t measure usefully and realistically is quite a bit higher than it is for Google. Having highly intelligent, skilled and experienced people who can derive complex formulas effectively does greatly expand the effective use of measurements.
Still there are limits, and those limits are much lower for most organizations that have neither, thousands of phd level mathematicians, rocket scientists, software engineers etc. nor a anything approaching Google’s percentage of such people.
Still I think we will benefit from the innovation that will continue to take place at Google. The are making great strides in using data to inform their decision making process.
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March 18th, 2007 at 12:17 am
There is no substitute for knowledge – W. Edwards Deming.
January 13th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package…
April 25th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
I must say I am not at all convinced that a new method without theory ready to supplant the existing scientific method. Now I can’t find peter Norvig’s exact words online (come on Google – organize all the World’s information for me please)…