Blog | Recent Posts
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Bad Arguments
A lot of arguments simply don’t make sense. Spotting bad arguments is a vital, and I’d guess, rare skill for academics and business people. Ali Almossawi has a fun little book on bad arguments. They are all illustrated to make them more memorable. I don’t completely endorse all the descriptions. Still, he raises important things to bear in mind…
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Lying With Statistics
While statistics can help us understand the world there is plenty of opportunity to abuse them to mislead. Darrell Huff wrote a short book that was first published in 1952 on lying with statistics. Some of the text shows its age (lots of male pronouns and references to gentleman) but many of the lessons remain applicable today. Reading Huff’s…
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How Do Academic Marketers Choose Their Objectives?
I think one of the great problems in marketing academia is that we spend a lot of time thinking about our models and very little time on our data. We have increasing clear views of how things connect up but we don’t really know what it is that we are connecting up. Deciding what objective…
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Spurious Correlations: A Big Problem With Big Data?
Tyler Vigen has done great work popularizing Spurious Correlations. He has found an effective way to convey an important message. Namely, that correlation does not equal causation. Lots of things are correlated but that doesn’t mean that they have anything to do with each other. Data Dredging To create his graphs Vigen indulges in: Data Dredging… a technique used…
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What Is First Mover Advantage?
Information Rules by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian is a classic business book. While today’s post will be a bit cranky it isn’t really about the book and I’ll be appropriately positive next week. The book descriptions of business scenarios are dated but the ideas are relatively timeless. Plus the dated examples make you feel young — battles…
