I'm been toying with this idea. I want to move away from the tired data vs intuition dichotomy. I don't think it accurately describes what is going on. The people who are labeled as intuitionists often include data in their arguments. The people who are experts at harvesting insights from data readily admit using intuition. So that distinction is hard to nail down.
Instead, I think a more useful dichotomy is data-first versus story-first. Some people have a story, and they are good at building support for the story by assembling pieces of data. Other people like to shake the story out of the data. You know who you are.
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Last week, I came across a good example of story-first thinking in the business press. An article in Business Insider has the headline "Bed Bath and Beyond is slashing the coupons that have long been synonymous with the brand..." The article talks about how the struggling retailer may have found a lifeline in the pandemic; good for them!
Then came this juicy bit:
The writer tells us that BB&B customers don't care about those coupons anyway. To support that, she said "50% of [...] customers said that they shopped at the store because of its coupons". I mean, if half your customers came to the store because of the coupons, I'd say coupons are really important to this business!
Don't worry though because she rescued the story by telling us that the 50% is "a lower number than in previous years."
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What's going on here? I don't think she was blinded by intuition. She literally used data in this argument and throughout the article so she qualifies as data-driven.
You can't say she messed up the data either. Her reasoning is standard - it just doesn't work with the numbers she's got. If only 5 percent of Bed Bath and Beyond customers said they shopped there because of coupons, I wouldn't have written this blog post.
I also do not think the writer is being manipulative. I think what she did came naturally to her - the story-first mindset, by which you assemble the pieces of data that support the story you have in mind. This style of thinking is commonplace, in my experience.
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It's the day before Election Day in the United States. We are about to drown in a flash flood of story-first thinking. Journalists have been writing articles to warn against premature conclusions on Election Night. They even paint the worst-case scenario in which Trump leads in in-person voting but ultimately loses the election when mail-in ballots are tallied. (If I am not mistaken, the New York Times was the first to sound this alarm, way back in early September.)
For my international readers, here's how messy elections are here. There is no federally managed and standardized electoral process. Every jurisdiction, sometimes at the state level, sometimes at lower levels, sets their own rules. As a result, there is a built-in unfairness because your ease of voting depends on where you live. In particular, people who live in densely populated cities frequently have to wait in line, sometimes hours, to cast a vote. Because of the raging pandemic, some people just don't find it safe to stand in lines for hours, and many jurisdictions have created alternatives such as mail-in voting and drive-through voting.
When it comes to mail-in voting, the two parties have been fighting over it. An incomplete list of the major issues are: whether one needs to apply for a mail-in ballot or if the state should just distribute everyone a mail-in ballot; how many collection boxes should there be for mail-in ballots; whether churches or other private groups can set up their own collection boxes for mail-in ballots; the deadlines for sending in mail-in ballots; whether the Post Office should prioritize or retard the delivery of ballots; what to do with "late"-arriving mail-in ballots; what constitutes a "valid" mail-in ballot; when states can start counting mail-in ballots; how much time states are given to count mail-in ballots, etc. etc.
What all sides agree on is that incomplete data nuggets will arrive throughout Election Night, and the final story is unlikely to emerge until days or weeks later - unless the voting margin is decisively large.
So I put this question up on Twitter last week: "Given the media keep telling us to be patient next Tuesday, will the media refrain from horse-race reporting until the final tally is available?"
What's going to happen is that the political pundits will assemble these data nuggets to support whatever story they have in mind. In fact, this has already started. On cable news, they have been reporting the number of mail-in ballots already received in various states, and the party registration of these voters (including, mind you, a good chunk of unaffiliated voters who don't want to register with either party).
And then, they are telling us which party is ahead - clearly based on assumptions of how much "disloyalty" there exists within each party, and the vote split among the unaffiliated.
How do these journalists or data journalists form their assumptions? Remember that historical data are not useful since there is an explosion of mail-in voting due to the pandemic. The assumptions are colored, partially or wholly, by how they think the election will turn out. In other words, they will be engaging story-first thinking.
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