Thomas Thurston on Data Science vs Intuition: Which is Better?

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Over at the Growth Science Blog, Thomas Thurston describes how the question of whether data science is better than human intuition is really false choice.

Relying on your wits is part of doing business. However if there are big problems that keep resurfacing, it’s a lot slower to go on guessing. If you don’t bring data science or some other form of rigor to the table you may never get a grip on what the underlying problem is. In the long term it’s a lot slower to treat the symptoms (keep guessing) than to cure the heart of the disease (ex. use data science). In contrast, data science is often slower at first, but faster later on. It can take hours, months or even generations for data science to model, predict or solve some of business’s toughest riddles. However once you’ve built a robust tool, it’s relatively fast and easy to handle or even prevent those problems if they threaten to pop up again.

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  1. […] whole four step process in an instant. As data scientist Thomas Thurston pointed out in a recent inside-BigData post, “… a lot of business decisions have to be made quickly. There isn’t time to build a […]

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