> He even closes the article with the following:
>
>> Your time may better spent getting in there and trying things rather than reading about what other people think.
But collectively, those people have spent a lot more time on the technologies, in many more situations, than I have used them or am likely to use them. How am I better off ignoring them and throwing away data? How does listening to them make me worse off?
When I was looking at statistics languages, I didn't spend a year trying Stata, a year trying SAS, a year trying Julia, a year trying Matlab, a year trying Panda+Python, a year trying R; I just looked at what people were using and blogging about and opinions on them, and picked R. How would I have been better off ignoring all of the community discussions and picking on my own? What systematic tendency causes the discussions to be literally worse than random noise?
The passage you quote doesn't say "worse than random noise", it says "worse than trying it out". I'm not sure that's true but it is a substantially weaker claim.
But collectively, those people have spent a lot more time on the technologies, in many more situations, than I have used them or am likely to use them. How am I better off ignoring them and throwing away data? How does listening to them make me worse off?
When I was looking at statistics languages, I didn't spend a year trying Stata, a year trying SAS, a year trying Julia, a year trying Matlab, a year trying Panda+Python, a year trying R; I just looked at what people were using and blogging about and opinions on them, and picked R. How would I have been better off ignoring all of the community discussions and picking on my own? What systematic tendency causes the discussions to be literally worse than random noise?