I’ve always felt there is a similarity to day traders or people who overanalyze stock fundamentals. There comes a time when data analysis becomes astrology…

> There comes a time when data analysis becomes astrology.

Excellent quote. It's counterintuitive but looking at what is most likely to happen according to the datasets presented can often miss the bigger picture.

This. It is often the scope and context that determines logic. It is easy to build bubbles and stay comfy inside. Without revealing much, I asked a data scientist whose job it is to figure out bids on keywords and essentially control how much $ is spent on advertising something at a specific region about negative criteria. As in, are you sure you wouldn’t get this benefit even if you stopped spending the $ and his response was “look at all this evidence that our spend caused this x% increase in traffic and y% more conversions” and that was 2 years ago. My follow up question was - okay, now that the thing you advertised is popular, wouldn’t it be the more organic choice in the market, and we can stop spending the $ there? His answer was - look at what happened when we stopped the advertising in this small region in Germany 1.5 years ago! My common sense validation question still stands. I still believe he built a shiny good bubble 2 years ago, and refuses to reason with wider context, and second degree effects.

The people who spend on marketing are not incentivised to spend less :)

> There comes a time when data analysis becomes astrology...

or just plain numerology

Leos are generally given the “heroic/action-y” tropes, so if you are, for example, trying to pick Major League Baseball players, astrology could help a bit.

Right for the wrong reasons is still right.

Right for the wrong reasons doesn't give confidence it's a sustainable skill. Getting right via randomness also fits into the same category.

My data driven climate model indicates that we could combat climate change by hiring more pirates.

Some of the most superstitious people I've ever met were also some of the most data-driven people I've ever met. Being data-driven doesn't exclude unconscious manipulation of the data selection or interpretation, so it doesn't automatically equate to "objective".

The data analysis I've seen most SEO experts do is similar to sitting at a highway, carefully timing the speed of each car, taking detailed notes of the cars appearance, returning to the car factory and saying that all cars need to be red because the data says red cars are faster.