Just as good alternatives to big-five theories of personality

It is a source of irritation to me that there exists ridiculously worthless and wrong psychological models in widespread use. Big five sends me into dangerous blood pressure levels. It’s preposterous and obviously only says something about the obsessions of the WIERD substrate it allegedly applies to, more than it says anything about the diversity of personality among human beings. When I say big-five is, worthless I don’t only mean it only applies to WIERD people, though that’s observably true; I mean it pertains to states of mind rather than permanent characteristics. It also is pretty worthless in predicting behavior, which is the only useful thing about psychometrics. I don’t care what people are feeling like when they take a test unless that maps directly onto long term behavioral patterns. Otherwise, it’s just checking in; “hey how you doin’ today?”

Five factor tests are essentially bags of words that respondents are asked to agree or disagree with. The assumption is that the bag of words form a basis set for describing human personalities. I have no doubts that they cluster very well under linear regression at least on WEIRD personalities. The problem is such models don’t have much explanatory power in explaining actual human psychological variance. 

Self testing, my results are all over the map. For example I took the thing and got this, this afternoon:

Addressing them one by one: for an extrovert, I surely do spend a lot of time by myself. I’m funny and do well at parties, but my natural set point is sitting on a mountain somewhere with a book. I’ll cop to “emotional stability” in that I’m fairly unflappable, though at various times in my life I was probably pretty neurotic. Locklin the disagreeable? Certainly I don’t suffer fools gladly. I’m also the dickhead who checks in on people to make sure they’re doing OK and who notices when they’re not; disagreeable people don’t do that. Conscientious; whatever -totally varies over time there are multiple 5 year periods of my life where I did nothing but chase women and drink heavily. I do usually pick things up off the floor, and go through vast map-reduce phases of gather/sort, though sometimes my desk looks like a junk pile.  Intellect/Imagination aka “Openness” -this one is most hilarious of all. It’s true, I revel in matters of the mind, I enjoy travel, art and I like messing with new ideas. While I’m fairly creative in my thinking, I’m also extremely traditional in my thinking: something that doesn’t compute with psychologists, who obviously don’t read much history or know who Ezra Pound or LeMaitre was. Or, for that matter Freeman Dyson or Heisenberg or Mendel or Celine or  Ernst Junger or Dali …. the list is endless -particularly among artistic and scientific giants. None of this is capable of predicting, say, who I voted for in the last election, or how likely I am to check in on the nice old lady upstairs. It’s just a bunch of shaggy dog stories and stereotypes about self regarding white college students in America in the mid to late 20th century.

another bad model mapped onto other cultures

I think pretty much anything is better than this; for example, the Hippocrates theory that men come in Phlegmatic, Choleric, Sanguine and Melancholic flavors is obviously better from a behavioral point of view, as they relate to how people behave. I don’t think those clusters map onto anything real, but I know people who exemplify all of these archetypes. Particularly people in Latin countries, more or less where the idea originated in ancient times.

There is also the Japanese blood type personality test. I only know a few Japanese people, and only well enough to know they take this idea seriously. I know that the English language wiki on the subject dismisses it as superstition, where the wiki link on big-five is treated with gaping credulity, and that seems to me, well, rather culturally insensitive. I’m willing to bet Japanese blood personality is more real and possibly more useful in Japan than big-five is in the US.

There are many things that matter which five-factor tests are completely blind to, for example: energy level. Some people vibrate with energy and enthusiasm. It has nothing to do with *any* of the five factors. It probably has something to do with thyroid activity and physical fitness. Dominance -some people dominate the room, and some have to be in charge otherwise they lose their shit; others go with the flow. Secretiveness; some people are not particularly forthcoming and you have no idea what they’re up to; they may even become anxious if you pry. They’re not necessarily up to anything shady, that’s just how some people are. Spooks love hiring such people. Curiosity: some people are curious about all kinds of things; other people really like sports or whatever fills up their hours.  Curious people tend to make better scientists, engineers, mechanics and detectives. Sociopathy; imagine you forgot to look for this in a life partner or cofounder -five factor doesn’t think it’s of any importance at all, because muh factors. Self reliance: some people don’t like getting help from others, other people seem to enjoy being dependent parasites. Character;  some people do as they say and say as they do. According to the five factor model, character has something to do with cleaning your room, or how likely you are to execute on a plan. Well, I’m here to tell you these are completely unrelated traits. There are deceptive, evil assholes who clean their rooms and can execute plans well, and people of the absolute highest character who live like slobs and are disorganized and lazy. Courage: some people don’t mind having grenades thrown at them all day; others wet the bed at the idea of walking around in the woods by themselves without a covid diaper on their face. Thrill seeking: some people may or may not be courageous, but seek sensory stimulation; others prefer a boring life and purchase lots of insurance. Beyond that: impulsivity is a trait many display, and others do not. You may be impulsive, a physical coward and thrill seeking: people like this exist -you meet them all the time. Five-factor will simply lump them all in with other unrelated populations of people such as one encounters on college campuses and in the clerical jobs they mostly matriculate to later. All of these are absolutely critical to people’s self conception and how they behave in the actual observable world. Modern psychology pretty much ignores them.

I think Cattell’s 16 factor test might measure more important things. However whenever I take the thing I always get a bullseye. Does this mean I have no personality, or does it mean it doesn’t measure my personality well? I think it might be a good start from a behavioral point of view, but it seems to be fairly unpopular among psychologist types. Cattell of course started out with training in the physical sciences, which is why he presumably thinks like me; wanting to make maps to observable behaviors.

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory MMPI is an old spook developed thing more or less designed to ascertain how fucked up you are. I think it’s reasonably useful for filtering out WEIRD types who might be mentally ill, or, like, evil, and things like it should probably be more widely used. This despite the fact that, in America anyway, the prevalence of personality disorders is approaching 10%. Seems useful to me even if you can only catch half of them. Tolerance of crazy and evil people is one of the worst things about modernity.

Myers Briggs I do not consider a better model; it’s astrology tier. Nobody else seems to take it seriously either, except for the people who sell the tests, and the credulous people who pass them around because they’re fun. There are other crummy ones out there; one is called DISC, and it seems to be universally reviled by academic psychology researchers, despite it being invented by the creator of Wonder Woman. I don’t know why they hate it so much; doesn’t seem much worse than five factor -maybe oriented towards winnowing out people who might be good at sales, which, unlike five-factor, is at least an ambition to be useful to somebody. Also inventing Wonder Woman is pretty cool.

Psychology is mostly a profoundly silly basket of shaggy dog stories masquerading as a serious subject; it gets sillier by the decade. The five factor test is one of the tools the psychologists seem most proud of, but it’s really just a demonstration of how intellectually bankrupt they are. Anyone who has actually understood the linear regression tool knows you can have five “good” factors and understand absolutely nothing about how the universe works. After all, butter production in Bangladesh, US cheese production and sheep population in the US and Bangladesh is an absolutely superb three factor model for the S&P500 [Leinweber’s famous PDF]. Since these mere three factors explain 99% of the variance in the S&P500, isn’t this a better model than five-factor?

We laugh at the idea that sheep, cheese and butter predict the S&P500, then credulously accept the idea that psychologists have some how nailed it with the five factor model because “muh variance” on some arbitrary data set of a ridiculously censored population sample. It’s not that I don’t think studying human behavior is interesting; it is one of the most interesting subjects there is. It’s just that psychological researchers are a bunch of doofuses.

“Bit Player:” desecrating the memory of Claude Shannon

I used to submit a lot of reviews to Amazon. Because Amazon is now operated by pigfucking NPCs, they’ve basically taken down most of my interesting and all of my negative reviews. I’ll be reposting them all here in some fashion; in part because they make up my notes on some of these books and movies, but also to gather Amazon good boy points; they should be paying me for providing them cover for all the fake reviews and removed negative reviews on their website.

I recently watched something on Amazon prime called “Bit Player” about the life of Claude Shannon. It was a desecration, and I won’t make it easier for people to watch it by linking to it. Shannon is portrayed as a doddering old imbecile; something that was never true, despite his tragic late life Alzheimer’s disease. This is what Shannon was like when he was old and had Alzheimer’s disease:

 

This is what he was portrayed as:

This turd of a fauxumentary is a strange mixture of interviews with a few people who knew Shannon, some completely irrelevant people, and a bunch of boring and cringey interludes where Shannon is portrayed by actors for … “reenactments.” Most of the footage of fictional Claude Shannon shows him at home being interviewed by a stunning and brave diverse female actress of color, who gives a convincing portrayal of someone who doesn’t actually exist, which as far as I can tell is the truest portrayal in the thing. These fictionalized conversations were supposed to have taken place in interviews at Claude Shannon’s house in the 1980s. Was it done by a “hidden figure?” If so, maybe the film maker should identify them! I’m pretty sure it wasn’t though; just as I am pretty sure Shannon would have kicked anyone asking such dumb questions out of his house no matter how stunning and brave.

As I said, Shannon is portrayed as a doddering boob; a sort of stereotypical absent minded professor: Mr Wizard with a couple of screws loose. While the poor guy basically died of losing his mind: he never acted this way, and the portrayal of him as such is profoundly disrespectful of a great man. I can’t even imagine the level of disrespect required to portray the man this way: imagine if Erwin Schroedinger were portrayed as a self-regarding, coughing, mystical-bohemian pervert who was also a doddering imbecile: that would be more accurate and slightly more respectful of Herr Dr. Professor Schroedinger’s legacy. 

A bunch of random, inarticulate academic irrelevancies and random gasbags are interviewed; presumably because they knew the filmmaker. There’s also Jimmy Soni, who I suppose qualifies as “random gasbag” though he at least wrote a book about Shannon. He did this despite being completely unqualified to do so, and despite having the fine literary qualities of the former McKinsey associate and Puffington Host hack that he actually is. He’s also an inarticulate plank of wood on camera. Well played, sir. They  got Rob Goodman who coauthored that atrocity with Soni, who is of similar timber, but he had the good taste to not be on camera as much. FWIIW their book was so bad, I actually couldn’t finish it. I’ll probably go back and slog through it: these people had no business writing what they did. They’re about as qualified to do so as I am to write a biography of Kautilya, which is to say, I could probably pull it off and fool a lot of people, because, like, wikipedia and I read his book or whatever, but I would be completely unqualified to do so. If you actually want to read a biography of Shannon; go read his Wiki page -it’s better.

They did manage to get Shannon’s actual daughter on film; this is a bit (you see what I did there) of a treat, as she (obviously) actually knew Shannon and kind of resembles him physically; arguably in manner as well. Somehow they avoided getting his son, who seems like a more  interesting person, but I guess he’s too white, male and talented or something. Or maybe he just thought the producers were arseholes, an obvious truism in hindsight. They  managed to talk to Kleinrock who knew Shannon, though he might as well not have been in the thing for all they got out of him: his main comment seemed to be that Shannon wasn’t excellent at arithmetic. Same story with Robert Gallager whose career was deeply intertwined with Shannon’s work, but whose comments can be summarized as “well he wasn’t a businessman.” Instead they let this nameless professorial ninny babble on most of the time:

How to make Shannon more boring? I know, we’ll get this squinty weird lady to talk about him

I could grouse endlessly about the narrative in this thing, how nobody putting this thing together has the slightest clue about important results in information theory or the historical trajectory of Shannon’s work and life. There are tons of people still around who could have made interesting comments about the life of Claude Shannon. You could have let Kleinrock or Gallager talk, but you probably would have had to ask them intelligent questions. There is Ed Thorp  the guy who actually did the roulette thing with Shannon; he’s around and loves to talk. Or maybe the dude who invented smalltalk, who was a Shannon grad student; or his brother (same) who invented computer graphics. Heck Shannon’s wife must have been alive for at least the beginning of the production. Instead they got fucking Nima (for the love of God Nima, get a haircut; it’s not Rodericks Chamber days any more), who gabbles on uselessly about black holes which have absolutely nothing to do with anything Claude Shannon worked on or had anything to do with. Shannon was the anti-black hole scientist: despite the nonsense popular with cosmological and noodle theory dingbats, pretty much all of black hole physics is worthless quasi-theological gibberish. Information theory is both incredibly useful and true. Everything Shannon worked on had applications in the actual world: quite unlike black hole contemporary “physics” douchebags who will never be held to account for their numerous sins.

Finally there is the title. “Bit player?” Shannon is the most important applied mathematician and inventor of the late 20th and early 21st century. Nobody else comes close. What would they call a documentary on Maxwell? “Waves haggis-man?” What would their clever title for Newton be? “Calculus apple-noggin sperdo?” Napoleon’s documentary is “big hat frog midget.”  How about calling your documentary of Freud “Pervert Schlomo” while you’re at it. What fucking pinhead planet are you from calling a documentary of Shannon “Bit player?” Die in a fire, you fucking philistines!

What I imagine happened here: the creators of this atrocity probably started out with good intentions. They knew a biography of this important and popularly underappreciated man was on the way, and so putting together an actual documentary would be a logical thing to do. They probably got the sparse interviews from the appropriate people credulous enough to speak with them (daughter, last grad student, ex-wife from the early 40s, etc), rather than showing them the business end of a boot, which was what the filmmakers deserved. But at the end of it, since they didn’t know what kind of useful questions to ask, they only had 10 minutes worth of interviews. So, they interview some academic irrelevancies they know or can get on film on the topic, let them carry it. Still only 30 minutes of footage (by this point, mostly irrelevant babbling by dimwits). Rent checks are coming due. Your friends are asking you when the Shannon bio will be out. So you hire a couple of actors to portray Shannon to fill in the blanks. Maybe a dimwitted cousin animator to knit it together.Then you call back some gaseous professor to speak more words because none of it makes any sense.

I mean, I get it; people have kids to feed, ex-wives to pay off. Mistakes were made. I can forgive a man for making a shitty documentary -most of them are. I can even forgive him for un-personing all the painfully white and male characters in Shannon’s painfully white and male  life. If you’re a white and male filmmaker in NYC, your friends might call you a racist for including too many white and male  …. and even protestant …. people in a documentary on an almost preternaturally white and male genius. That’s just how the world works these days of the decaying empire. Got to shove in as many diverse stunning and brave females as you possibly can, and point out that Shannon’s wife was better at math (well arithmetic anyway) than Shannon was. However, I can’t forgive his nastiness in his portrayal of Shannon, nor his desecration of Shannon’s memory.  Rather than a doddering old fool in the mould of Mr Wizard he was portrayed as, he was a literal wizard in human flesh. He was a powerful intellect and a no-nonsense man; a playful but fierce Merlin. Look at his  eyes man: he could probably light fires with the power of his mind.

Professor Shannon disapproves of this from beyond the grave

This film is nothing more than a desecration; worse than knocking over statues of great men or spray painting a religious edifice. The men who are responsible for this atrocity should never work in this domain again. Really, they should be tarred and feathered; shunned by all right-thinking people. 

 

Here, have you some actual Claude Elwood Shannon:

 

Secrets of a successful shut in

My bona fides: I’ve effectively been doing the “work from home” thing since 2007. There’s been times here and there where I visit customer sites, or have been traveling a lot, but it is more or less the same thing for 13 years. I’ve helped build a couple of businesses, kept in decent shape, traveled, read many great books, written a few hundred thousand words for the general public, have maintained an active and satisfying social life and many great friendships. I’m no role model, but most people could do worse, and I did it all almost entirely with a 10 second commute from bed to desk. It may be new to you, but you can have a good life living like this. 

First thing: when you get up in the morning, get the fuck up. Then get some exercise. Touch your toes, swing a kettlebell, go for a run, do yoga. Doesn’t really matter what you do; just do something. Get your blood flowing to your brain before you get to work. Some people do their full exercise program in the morning; I train too hard to do that and be productive. So, for me, the mornings are just a little warm up (karate warmup or Farmer Burns, maybe Indian clubs routines), joint mobility (Pavel Tsatsouline and Max Shank routines) and stretching. 

 

Next thing: get dressed. Take a shower, put your pants on; you’re going to work, so you should behave like you’re going to work as in an ordinary work in the office day. I used to actually put on a tie and sports coat (this was before zoom meetings); it’s the right mentality to overdress when you’re working at home. Sure some of you can get away with doing work in your slippers and sweatpants; you shouldn’t try to do this if you’re new at it. Overdress even if you feel dumb. Put the slippers and sweatpants on when you’re done work.

When you sit down to do work; do your work in a special place in your house. If you’re new to this; take your laptop to a place which you put aside for your work. If you have a family, ideally this special place is somewhere they won’t disturb you much. Key is to pattern match on “this is work” -make all your habits agree with this work mindset. You should not goof off there, or if you do, make your physiology such that it’s different during work time and goof off time (aka standing desk for work, sit down for goof off time). You’re trying to fix your brain to the habit of working there.

Lighting: you need bright lights to be fully awake and at work. Nobody has mood lighting in their office. Factories are brightly lit; not always to view the workpiece; it keeps people alert. Open the windows, buy a corn cob light (google it; corn cob lights are amazing); do whatever needs to be done to have a brightly lit workspace. Not optional; if you try to work in a cave, you’ll be moosh headed and worthless and living a half baked life.

Not goofing off: you’re probably goofing off right now reading this. Don’t do it. Use a pihole if you have to and block off your goof off websites this way. Your brain does need little breaks; get up and walk around. If you have to take breaks using computer or checking social media or whatever; try to use a different device than your work computer. 

Pomadoro: the pomadoro technique is a great tool taught to me by Kevin Lawler. I don’t think it is universally applicable, but it is generally applicable. Anything you’re grinding out; pomadoro it. The little breaks keep you fresh, and the schedule keeps you working instead of getting stuck down the  wiki hole. The other thing that makes it super helpful; the regular interrupts keep you from going down a non-productive direction on your work tasks. 

Not over communicating: slack is sort of useful when your company is 20 people; it becomes unweildy beyond that. If you’re like me, your high impact stuff is small projects that don’t require much collaboration. I check slack and email once or twice a day unless I’m managing people, and have all alerts for these things turned off. For those of you who have alerts on your phone (fools!): those need to be turned off as well. Use the telephone for talking on; it saves lots of time compared to thumb typing on your stupid ipotato. It actually feels nicer too; you get no real human interaction from thumb typing, but voice is …. talking to someone at least.

Keeping a schedule: you need to keep regular hours, and not be on call at all hours of the day and night. If you’re working at home, you should be in front of a computer, working.  If you’re messaging people on slack over dinner, unless you’re C-level (and even then), you’re an imbecile and you have not only failed at your job; you have failed at life. 

One of the most difficult professions is that of creative writer. You’re completely alone with your thoughts; there’s nothing else, no process or outside world to interact with (there are successful team writers, but they’re rare). As such, they really “work at home.” One of my favorite books on this is Pressfield’s War of Art. Everyone who does creative work should buy this book and live his advice. For those who don’t, two takeaways; point your lucky work doodad at yourself to give you power, and say a prayer to whatever gods you believe in (or don’t believe in -Pressfield prays to ancient Greek muses). You’re prepping your brain for work.

Frens: no man is an island, during the imbecile lock downs which will occur in the West in coming months, you may become isolated. There are dozens of free video chat softwares out there if you don’t have a work zoom license you can use; stuff like Kosmi allows you to play games and watch videos together. If you have pals nearby and you/they don’t live with elderly family, you should go visit them; don’t be a covidiot. There’s lots of other stuff you need to get right as well; have friends, hobbies, religion, make your bed, clean your room. You should take care of all that as well. But I figured I’d mention talking to your pals, since sometimes people forget.

Data is not the new oil: a call for a Butlerian Jihad against technocrat data ding dongs

I tire of the dialog on “big data” and “AI.” AI is an actual subject, but as used in marketing and press releases and in the babbling by ideologues and think tank dipshits, the term is a sort of grandiose malapropism meaning “statistics and machine learning.” As far as I can tell “big data” just means the data at one point lived in something other than a spreadsheet.

 “BigDataAI” ideology is a continuation of the program of the technocratic managerial “elite.” To those of you who are unfamiliar with the work of James Burnham, there is a social class of technocratic “experts” have largely taken over the workings of society in the West; a process which took place in the first half of the 20th century. While there have always been bureaucrats in civilized societies, the ones since around the time of Herbert Hoover have aped “scientific” solutions even where no such thing is actually possible. This social class of bureaucrats has had some mild successes; the creation of the American highway system, public health initiatives against trichinosis, US WW-2 production. But they have mostly discredited themselves for decades: aka the shitty roads in America, the unaffordable housing in major urban centers, a hundred million fat diabetics, deindustrialization because muh free market reasons, the covidiocy and most recently, the failure of every noteworthy technocrat in the world’s superpower to predict election outcomes and even its ability to honestly count its votes. Similar social classes interested in central planning also failed spectacularly in the Soviet Union, and led to the cultural revolution in China. There are reasons both obvious and deep as to why these social classes have failed.

The obvious reason is that mandarinates are inherently prone to corruption when there are no consequences for their failures. Bureaucrats are  wielders of power and have the extreme privilege of collecting a pension on the public expense. Various successful cultures had different ways of keeping them honest; the Prussians and pre-Soviet Russian bureaucrats recruited from honor cultures. Classical China and the early Soviets did it  via fear. The Soviet Union actually worked pretty well when the guys from Gosplan could be sent to the Gulag for their failings (or because Stalin didn’t like their neckties -keeps them on their toes). It progressively fell apart as it grew more civilized; by the 1980s, nobody was afraid of the late night knock on the door, and the Soviet  system fell apart when the US faked like it was going to build ridiculous space battleships. The rise of China has largely been the story of bureaucratic reforms by Deng where accountability (and vigorous punishment for malefactors) were the order of the day. Singapore makes bureaucrats meet regularly with their constituents; seems reasonable -don’t know why every society doesn’t make this a requirement. It is beyond question the American equivalent of the Gosplan mandiranate is almost unimaginably corrupt at this point, and the country is falling apart as a result. 

While it gives policy-makers a sense of agency having a data project, consider that there isn’t a single large scale data project beyond the search engine that has improved the lives of human beings. Mind you, the actual civilizational utility of the search engine is highly questionable. What improvement in human living standards has come of the advent of google in the last 20 years? The only valuable content on the internet is stuff made by human beings. Google effectively steals or destroys most of the revenue of content creators who made the stuff worth looking at in the first place. Otherwise, library science worked just fine without blue haired Mountain View dipshits running SVD on a link graph. INSPEC (more or less; dmoz for research) is 120 years old and is still vastly better for research than google scholar. Science made more progress then between 1898 and 2005 or so when google more or less replaced it: and the news wasn’t socially toxic clickfarming idiocy back when the CIA censored the  news instead of google komissars with facial piercings. These days google even sucks at being google; I generally have more luck with runaroo or just going directly to things on internet archive.

If “AIBigData” were so wonderful, you’d see its salutary effects everywhere. Instead, a visit to the center of these ideas, San Francisco is a visit to a real life dystopia.There are thousands of data projects which have made life obviously worse for people. Pretty much all of nutrition and public health research post discovery of vitamins, and statisticians telling people not to drink toilet water is worthless or actively harmful (look at all those fat people waddling around). Most biomedical research is false, and most commonly prescribed drugs are snake oil or worse. Various “pre-crime” models used to justify setting bail or prison sentences are an abomination. The advertising surveillance hellscape we’ve created for ourselves is both aesthetically awful and a gigantic waste of time. The intelligence surveillance hellscape we’ve created mostly keeps its crimes secret, and does nothing obviously helpful. Annoying advertising invading every empty space; I don’t want to watch ads to pump gas or get money from my ATM machine.  Show me something good these dorks have done for us; I’m not seeing it. Most of it is moronic overfitting to noise, evil or both.

It’s less obvious but can’t be stated often enough: often “there is no data in your data.” The technocracy’s mathematical tools boil down to versions of the t-test being applied to poorly sampled and/or heteroskedastic data where they may not be meaningful. The hypothesis under test may not have a meaningful null no matter how much data you collect. When they talk about “AI” I think it’s mostly aspirational; a way out of heteroskedasticity and actual randomness. It’s not; there are no “AI” t-tests in common use by these knuckleheads, and if there were, the upshot wouldn’t look that much different from 1970s era stats results. When they talk about big data, they don’t talk about , or issues like ROC curves and bias variance tradeoff. They certainly never talk about data which is heteroskedastic or simply random, which is most of it. 

In reality, data collection is mostly useless. In intelligence work, in marketing, political work: most of it is completely useless, and collecting it and acting on it is a sort of cargo cult for DBAs, cloud computing saleslizards, technocratic managerial nerds, economists, Nate Silver and other such human refuse. Once in a while it pays off. More often, the technocrat will take credit when things go his way and make complicated excuses when they don’t; just look at Nate Silver’s career for example; a clown with a magic 8-ball.  There’s an entire social class of “muh science” nerds who think it a sort of moral imperative to collect and act on data even if it is obviously useless. The very concept that their KPIs and databases might be filled with the sheerest gorp …. or that you might not be able to achieve marketing uplift no matter what you do… doesn’t compute for some people. 

Technocratic data people are mostly parasitic vermin and their extermination, while it would cut into my P/L, would probably be good for society. At the very least we should make their salaries proportional to (1- Brier) scores; that will require them to put error bars on their predictions, reward the competent and bankrupt the useless. Really though, they should all be sent to Idaho to pick potatoes. Or ….