[HN Gopher] The Oxymoron of "Data-Driven Innovation"
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The Oxymoron of "Data-Driven Innovation"
Author : Hell_World
Score : 75 points
Date : 2021-08-02 16:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (chelseatroy.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chelseatroy.com)
| lanstin wrote:
| In the US at least this principal is true for all kinds of
| innovation - food, humor, clothing style, music, religion,
| science fiction, etc., etc. The boring homogenized dominant
| culture blands things out seeking an anti-creative hegemony,
| while the marginalized people keep things moving forward. From
| the 60s there was a truism that in a given situation the less
| powerful see more of the overall reality than the more powerful.
| The less powerful have to see things in the dominant world view
| and in their own world view of how to stay safe and get their
| needs met in the skewed system; seeing more of reality leads
| naturally to having better solutions to various problems.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| > _The less powerful have to see things in the dominant world
| view and in their own world view of how to stay safe and get
| their needs met in the skewed system_
|
| Very much reminds of me "Seeing Like a State".
| taeric wrote:
| Careful here. You list a ton of things with the implication
| that they are all independent. But, "style" can pretty much
| explain major shifts in all of the other items.
|
| And the dominant culture is what drives a ton of... Well,
| everything.
|
| To pretend that progress only comes from the marginalized crowd
| is as silly as claiming it only comes from the kids. Probably
| less accurate, even.
| vittore wrote:
| I'd argue that is true universally in all countries and not
| just in US. If TV is your source of news in any capacity, you
| are in that skewed reality.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > I'd argue that is true universally in all countries and not
| just in US.
|
| The phrase "In the US at least" doesn't mean it doesn't
| happen in other countries. It just means that the US is OP's
| only frame of reference when making the claim.
| [deleted]
| Nevermark wrote:
| I like a lot of the ideas, even though they are a little
| disorganized.
|
| _Thought #1:_ I like the distinct recognition of benefits from
| "Building for yourself" and "Build for the margins".
|
| But I don't think they are disjoint. No matter how "majority"
| someone is on some dimensions, we all have frustrations we share
| with smaller groups.
|
| _Thought #2:_ I liked the thought of designing for the _ALL_ the
| marginalized in a given product area.
|
| Designing for any small underserved market is a great place to
| start. But keeping in mind _all_ the underserved around an
| existing market is a good way to narrow down initial solutions to
| ones that could eventually serve the maximum underserved people.
|
| It is a good way to develop branding as the solution for
| everyone, despite starting with the few.
|
| From a competitive standpoint, surrounding a big market from many
| underserved territories not only results in a Moore versatile
| product, but also sets up victory against incumbents before they
| see it coming.
|
| _Thought #3:_ I also like the idea of consciously serving
| traditionally sidelined groups or other minority groups with
| frustrations besides those that you are initially aiming to
| address.
|
| For starters, almost any focus is good focus when starting out.
|
| But beyond that, society is transitioning from one majority vs.
| many minorities, to a collection of a great many minorities. So
| thinking about market segmentation beyond obvious product
| segmentation will serve any company (and its prospective
| customers) into the future.
| diego_moita wrote:
| A small and non-relevant repair: Wayne Westerman didn't built
| FingerWorks for his mom. He did it for himself, he has difficulty
| using keyboards for a long time. A designer at Apple had a
| temporary injury and used it. The rest of the team loved and used
| it to build a touch interface for the Mac, long before they even
| considered a phone.
|
| Source: The One Device, the secret history of the iPhone by Brian
| Merchant
|
| There is also the OXO vegetable peeler. It was designed for the
| creator's wife, she had arthritis. Then the whole company grew
| from that.
| itronitron wrote:
| Also, in the first image one (or more) of those companies
| doesn't belong.
| kgwgk wrote:
| oxymoron
|
| noun
|
| a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear
| in conjunction
| deugo wrote:
| Interesting read. I found it racist and sexist. Yet, it attacks
| racism and sexism.
|
| How the author portrays the Timnit-Gebru drama is unjust. It was
| Gebru who withheld her paper for internal review, trying to throw
| a monkey-wrench in the process by submitting too late.
|
| > Jeff Dean's subsequent decision to terminate her rather than
| discuss the improvements she proposed.
|
| She proposed/demanded that the internal reviewers were de-
| anonymized. She told her underlings that they should stop working
| towards KPI diversity & inclusion goals, because it did not work,
| and that Google was marginalizing Black women like her before she
| got too powerful.
|
| Diversity & inclusion for a commercial business are decisions
| where profit matters. Data matters. D&I at Google was hijacked by
| a political movement. Activists got so much leeway, because the
| topic is taboo, it can be very damaging, and society seems still
| ok with bashing "exclusively cishet white guys" and accusing them
| of racism or privilege. D&I got abused. By elevating these
| (social-media) vocal marginals.
| sfink wrote:
| I loved this. It crystallizes some vague ideas and feelings I've
| had floating around for a while. Like kneejerk distrust of the
| typical over-reliance on A/B testing, while still having enormous
| respect for what it can provide.
|
| And on the many small tools I build for myself because the
| mainstream workflow just doesn't feel quite right. Some of them
| are a hit for other people, most not, but it doesn't matter that
| much to me because I really am building for myself. And yet, I'm
| often confused why nobody else is implementing something that is
| so obviously an incremental improvement in my mind, even if it's
| not something that's going to double your productivity or address
| the Real Problem or whatever.
| Zababa wrote:
| I don't really understand the iPhone example. I doubt that the
| touch UI was the only thing that made it work, and it's followed
| by "In fact, most of the things you love about your smartphone
| started as accessibility features." without ever backing that up.
| And then there's "3. Orgs can achieve momentous victories by
| prioritizing marginal business cases." which isn't really backed
| up too. You could probably make an argument that anyone that has
| a problem that can be solved by a product that would make a
| successful startup (so a big pain point) is marginalized, but
| that sounds like a circular definition to me.
|
| I feel like the whole post is playing a bit of a motte-and-bailey
| about the definition of marginalized people. A marginalized
| person could be "a formerly incarcerated black parent", that's
| the bailey. It could also be a small business owner that'd like a
| tool to see his cash flow, that's the motte. " We gotta get over
| this idea that we're being mensches by handing over our stolen
| power to unworthy or inexperienced charity cases." is another
| example of the bailey.
|
| Edit: corrected "It could also be a small business owner that'd
| like a tool to see his cash flow, that's the bailey." to "It
| could also be a small business owner that'd like a tool to see
| his cash flow, that's the motte."
| amatecha wrote:
| Great post -- thank you for sharing. I love this quote:
| "Visionary ideas derive directly from centering people at the
| margins"
| dade_ wrote:
| This click-bait and switch post is a nonsensical rant. Invest or
| waste your time elsewhere.
| taeric wrote:
| More time on this article and I think the body is just wrong. The
| visionary examples all highlighted seem more to be finding ways
| to leverage major technological changes that will be largely paid
| for by someone else.
|
| This has been tough to reason on lately because it isn't that you
| don't need to invest a ton of money. You do. But, if you are
| investing where other investments are getting made, you have a
| faster road to success.
|
| Now, granted, I can't really comment on the slack and Basecamp
| things... Largely, that feels more like a tempest in a teacup not
| realizing how big the rest of the world is?
|
| But the rest of the examples? Which, seems to just be one
| example. Apple and the touchscreen revolution. It would have died
| quickly if not for everyone jumping on it and making them better
| every year.
|
| There is an allusion to more examples in, "everything you love
| about smart phones". But for me, that amounts to an mp3 player
| and an audible app. Really only possible because of the
| minimization of storage and processing. And largely ignored
| advances in battery tech.
|
| I still resonate with some of the conclusion. Most of it, even.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| There's something about writing like this that gets at me. It's
| angry, for a good reason, it has lots of good points, but in
| trying to get across its main point, which is signaling
| dissatisfaction with the tech industry, attacks lots of groups,
| hits lots of unrelated points, and when it gets into historical
| tidbits overrates single events in order to build a narrative.
|
| For example, please stop using terms like cishet. I know what
| that means. I know it is important to marginalized communities,
| but know your audience. There is nobody, nobody in today's
| environment that could get away with saying "a bunch of
| (blacks|indians|mexicans|asians|gays|women)" but you say cishet
| white guys and you can group up a whole lot of people without
| thinking much about them as individuals. Do you believe this is
| constructive language that bridges the divide that's part of
| these issues? Do you know where my abuelita was from just because
| you can see the color of my skin?
|
| Second, I don't think the Slack example is really about
| inclusion. We all can be stalked and spammed, of course
| marginalized people more than others. However, Slack's slowness
| about this isn't nefarious, it's almost certainly they were
| making so much money recreating IRC that they didn't have time to
| worry about "minor" issues like that, the same way Hulu can ship
| a UI that works correctly on a phone but can't be bothered to fix
| bugs in the TV version that ships to 10 million people. It's not
| hatred or marginalization, it's just laziness and apathy, it's
| how our corporations work because they turn into these
| battlegrounds.
|
| > Steve Jobs wasn't some kind of genius visionary who
| independently thought that thing up.
|
| Jobs was infamous about taking credit, but he never would have
| made claims like this. That product like all of his products at
| the time was built by a small team, guided by Steve, that bought
| up and used lots of existing ideas. There's a reason we like to
| quote "great artists steal". Hell, the Newton existed 10 years
| earlier and they had Tony Faddell from an even earlier time that
| tried similar tech. (Steve Jobs, Becoming Steve Jobs, General
| Magic)
|
| Some of us are sympathetic to many of your points but outsiders
| don't only come in races or genders and the _only_ way we get out
| of this collective stagnation is to stop tearing each other down
| with various narratives about what 's wrong with them.
| majormajor wrote:
| I find it a reach that you're complaining about grouping when
| used in this context:
|
| > For example, I once worked for a company that poured a lot of
| effort into inclusive hiring: they made an inclusion skills
| rubric, placed ads in "diverse" tech spaces, et cetera. Two
| years later, all the "diverse people" they had carefully
| collected had left, and the company had backfilled with almost
| exclusively cishet white guys.
|
| This is a paragraph directly talking about an initiative to
| increase diversity that ultimately had little lasting impact,
| but is making no judgments about either the group of "diverse
| people" that didn't stick around nor the group of hires that
| followed.
|
| There's no thinking about either group there as individuals,
| nor positive or negative overall descriptions of them, just an
| anecdote about an HR initiative at a particular company that
| didn't really meet its objectives.
|
| What's there to be offended by, asks this person who hadn't
| even encountered the term "cishet" before this article but
| falls in the group?
| crazy_horse wrote:
| You're right it does seem like a small thing to pick on in
| this context.
|
| I think it stood out to me because like you said it's not a
| common term. It gets used in specific communities and areas
| (academia) but it's a term that the group it is describing
| doesn't actually use, it's an outgroup indicator, and it's
| more negative than similar terms like poc, bipoc. It's a
| culture war signal, even when not intended.
|
| Do I care about it? Not really, but it is a really small
| thing that would go a long ways towards inclusion as weird as
| that sounds.
| akiselev wrote:
| The statement as a whole is equally effective with just
| "white guys" since most people can draw their connotations
| from the context and those that can't wouldn't know the word
| anyway (and researching it throws them into the deep end).
| Reading between the lines (fairly or not), adding that
| descriptor implies a value judgement beyond the baseline lack
| of diversity. It draws attention to the individuals as the
| problem rather than systemic or emergent issues.
| legerdemain wrote:
| Cishet white male shaming is one of the most pernicious
| festering culture sores in the world today. We exist, we are
| real people, we want respect and representation, and _our
| voices matter_.
| [deleted]
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >you say cishet white guys and you can group up a whole lot of
| people without thinking much about them as individuals.
|
| I can empathize with the "turnabout is fair play" logic of
| it...
|
| >Do you believe this is constructive language that bridges the
| divide that's part of these issues?
|
| ...but, like you, I question its effectiveness in bringing us
| all together. My guess is that it generally triggers a sense of
| awareness in those who are already somewhere on the "allied"
| spectrum and that it triggers defensiveness and entrenchment in
| those that are on the fence or further away. There is clear
| benefit in the former and detriment in the latter. As you said:
| "know your audience."
| smolder wrote:
| There's no "turnabout" happening in being prejudiced against
| a group full of unique people, many of whom aren't so
| prejudiced.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I can't imagine that you are arguing that non-white, non-
| cis, and non-hetro people haven't been prejudiced against
| by whitecishetromales. That's where the "turnabout" comes
| into play.
|
| If you are pointing out that the "turnabout" is also
| prejudicial, then I obviously agree. The point I was making
| is that when it is misapplied, it's potentially helpful (in
| creating additional awareness in those who are on some
| spectrum of "allied") and when it is accurately applied,
| it's detrimental (as it is likely to lead to "defensiveness
| and entrenchment"). In this way, it may also serve as a way
| to measure our own position.
|
| Also, I don't think anyone knows whether "many" is
| accurate. The same point is made by saying "some."
| majormajor wrote:
| Labeling, as used in this article, is hardly even
| turnabout. The dominant group may not explicitly create a
| term to label themselves, but the act of exclusion
| requires separating out the "other," and so labeling the
| non-other isn't so much an act of "turnabout" as just
| putting a word to an already-created group.
|
| The people originally assuming all
| white/male/heterosexual/whatever people can and should be
| lumped together are the ones who have and continue to try
| to restrict jobs, property, and liberty from being given
| to people _outside_ that group.
|
| People will go a very long rhetorical way to try to
| refute the idea that if you want to fix racism in the US
| you need to address the very real and still very powerful
| and connected white racists. That problem won't magically
| fix itself because the people who desire racism to
| continue _actively pursue it_. We can 't even get rid of
| the confederate flag, for goodness sake.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > if you want to fix racism in the US you need to address
| the very real and still very powerful and connected []
| racists.
|
| Yes, exactly. And assuming all
| white/male/heterosexual/whatever people can and should be
| lumped together _helps_ said racists, as might be
| expected from their being the ones who originally did so.
| majormajor wrote:
| That lumping is, again, descriptive. And it's an often-
| useful description/category in large part because of that
| historical racism.
|
| Getting worked up over that is a huge waste of time, to
| the point that I now wonder if it's a sideshow. If we
| waste our time arguing about if this "the diverse hires
| left and the new hires after them were white" description
| is bad, we've been successfully distracted.
|
| The idea that anyone is _actually_ offended or feels
| harmed by that paragraph we 're talking about is absurd -
| could you imagine how such people would feel if they were
| part of one of the out-groups instead and didn't just get
| lumped together but also had been attacked by the
| centuries of racism in the US?
|
| This is the paragraph in question, once again:
|
| > For example, I once worked for a company that poured a
| lot of effort into inclusive hiring: they made an
| inclusion skills rubric, placed ads in "diverse" tech
| spaces, et cetera. Two years later, all the "diverse
| people" they had carefully collected had left, and the
| company had backfilled with almost exclusively cishet
| white guys.
|
| If you don't let yourself look at the demographics, you
| blind yourself to any ability to evaluate effectiveness
| in terms of fighting the historical and present effects
| of white supremacy in the US. Note that the "diverse
| people" are similarly lumped together because it's non-
| judgmentally discussing the effects of a policy, nothing
| more. I don't see any way someone takes offense at that
| paragraph, but I see lots of ways someone would pretend
| to in order to make reactionary/distracting claims about
| if we even need to try to fight that historical racism.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| > The idea that anyone is actually offended or feels
| harmed by that paragraph we're talking about is absurd
|
| It surprises me that you don't see that language like
| this is the same language used against marginalized
| groups. Nobody but the person that is offended gets to
| decide how they feel.
|
| We as people of lots of overlapping concerns have to be
| empathetic or we'll get more factionalism instead of
| unity and inclusion.
| majormajor wrote:
| I don't see it as at all the same thing. People get
| offended at slurs and insults, and I don't see why I
| should interpret this usage as either. Do you think the
| "diverse people" referred to in that paragraph should
| also be offended?
|
| Someone here is upset about the author "assuming all
| white/male/heterosexual/whatever people can and should be
| lumped together" - I fail to see how they're lumping
| those people in this story together any more than they
| are the other group.
|
| Someone here is upset about the author "being prejudiced
| against a group full of unique people" - I fail to see
| the prejudice in the quoted paragraph.
|
| Someone here is upset about "cishet white male shaming" -
| I fail to see the shaming.
|
| I don't see marginalized minority groups getting offended
| at, e.g. academic studies of the Mexican experience in
| the US for that same sort of grouping.
|
| That the term wasn't invented ourselves[0] seems to be
| the only real case being made here, but its an
| abbreviation of two technical terms, not an obvious slur.
| We could make an analogy to someone getting upset someone
| using one of one of "African American" vs "Black" vs
| another such term, but then we're getting pretty well
| into niche territory versus talking about something
| obviously offensive to everyone the term describes.
|
| [0] as far as I know, anyway, though I suppose it
| could've been.
| crazy_horse wrote:
| > I don't see marginalized minority groups getting
| offended at, e.g. academic studies of the Mexican
| experience in the US for that same sort of grouping.
|
| I see your point but I think you are making really big
| bunchings of value judgments. I live in a Hispanic
| community. There are lots and lots of people in that
| group that are cishet white males, their family members
| aren't going to call them that, though. Not a small
| number of them find being cishet as only morally
| acceptable.
|
| It's similar to latinx. They are terms that are used in
| very specific groups and mean something important there
| but when they get used across boundaries different groups
| are basically talking about different things (it's a
| freedom fighter/terrorist issue).
| majormajor wrote:
| The argument that in the pre-internet area, "for a glimpse of
| time, these privileged kids experienced a marginalization that
| the web suddenly made addressable" falls extremely flat to me.
|
| I've never seen anyone - in the tech industry or not - claim that
| they felt marginalized as a kid because they weren't growing up
| in NYC or Boston. So the idea that all these ideas popped up and
| had a market just because of this "geographic marginalization" is
| a huge reach.
|
| Sometimes there _is_ a demand for something new from a non-
| marginalized majority group, and that 's extremely likely to be
| the case with new technology, because new tech is definitionally
| new to both the mainstream and the margins.
|
| The claim that as an industry matures, new growth will start from
| the edges is not very different from our common use of
| "disruption" - neither the existing players nor their current
| customers anticipate the new thing - but it's also not really
| related to being "data driven" or not.
|
| You can try to serve the mainstream/your existing customer base
| in a data driven way or in a non-data-driven way.
|
| You can similarly try to find new opportunities with or without
| being data driven.
|
| There's a point in there about how if you're looking for new
| opportunities you need to be sophisticated in how you use your
| data, since you need to look for new insights and things that
| maybe won't show up in means and medians, but it's buried here in
| hard-to-support asides trying to exaggerate the business or
| innovation impact of being marginalized.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Completely agree. I actually do understand feeling like you're
| not part of the mainstream culture if you're not in a major
| city like NYC or LA. But that is not even close to the same
| thing as the problems of the marginalized communities the
| author wants to connect this to (who are either poor, have
| disabilities, have been targeted by racism, etc.)
|
| I also find this whole style of argument very dubious. The
| author clearly started from the conclusion first here - that
| it's important to consider the needs of marginalized groups -
| which they believe in for purely moral/ideological reasons. And
| then they're somewhat awkwardly and very transparently back-
| fitting a different rationale in front of it and arguing that
| actually this is what's best for your business. The argument is
| flimsy, and it's also entirely beside the point. If convincing
| counter-evidence were brought up that shows this entire
| argument is flawed, is the author going to reverse their stance
| and say "ok, I was wrong, let's just ignore marginalized groups
| because they aren't that important to the bottom line"? Of
| course not.
|
| I feel like this kind of back-fitting argument probably does
| more harm than good, and might just end up back firing later.
| Let's just be honest about what we're asking for here - we want
| companies to consider the needs of marginalized groups, for its
| own sake because it's the right thing to do.
| svieira wrote:
| > Let's just be honest about what we're asking for here - we
| want companies to consider the needs of marginalized groups,
| for its own sake because it's the right thing to do.
|
| Precisely! "Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is
| wrong even if everybody is wrong about it." [1]
|
| [1] G. K. Chesterton, _Illustrated London News_, May 11, 1907
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| I like this, especially the quote
|
| >Visionary ideas derive directly from centering people at the
| margins
|
| But I think the conundrum is still one step further - in these
| instances of the rich college kids building for their
| marginalized selves, they _had the means by which to do it_. The
| big for-profit corporations have the means too, but their
| existence is credited to being for-profit, because the
| corporations exhibiting not-as-profitable behavior eventually
| shrink or disappear.
|
| So I would say innovation still comes back to who can shoulder
| the risk. Wealthy college students can take the risks because
| they can always fall back on their trust funds or nepotic jobs,
| but decision makers at corporations can't because their not-
| profitable decisions affects their continued existence at a
| profitable corp.
|
| That means "Data Driven Innovation" comes down not to be
| literally "Data Driven", but really about spinning a story with
| whatever data to convince corporate gatekeepers that this new
| feature for the marginalized isn't that risky an innovation.
| Unfortunately people do take it literally, which is why this
| piece is a great reminder about where real innovation comes from.
| taeric wrote:
| Oddly, including Amazon in that initial description sours the
| idea. It was decidedly not someone building something in a garage
| they thought was neat. Rather, it was chasing a long tail market
| by taking advantage of the large exposure of a website.
|
| I am not sure this hurts the post overall.
| mostertoaster wrote:
| She did say -
|
| "At that time, in situ "applications" like bookstores, post
| offices, and auctions had a service gap: location dependence.
| You had to be at the place. That limited access to folks with
| time & transportation. It limited access even for wealthy,
| well-connected college kids."
|
| Essentially saying in this case everyone was marginalized.
| Though I guess you're right in that might diminish the point
| because the "data-driven" approach could be used to target
| these large groups of "marginalized" people.
| taeric wrote:
| I cede that I'm not sure it kills the point. Does dull it,
| though. Amazon becoming a thing was very much a business
| investment from the beginning.
|
| There is also the very inconvenient fact that the value at
| the margin will, almost by definition, be lower than the
| majority. The only way to turn that, is by capturing the full
| margin.
|
| You can see this with starlink. Getting some rural coverage
| for internet is not a large value proposition. Capturing all
| rural internet is.
| dang wrote:
| (Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please email
| hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a repost invite.)
| Graffur wrote:
| what is a repost invite?
| jstx1 wrote:
| I was interested in reading about data-driven product decisions
| and then the whole thing somehow ended up being about inclusion
| and the connection between the two seems really forced.
| arpa wrote:
| the underlying message boils down to:
|
| * data driven = incremental improvement
|
| * innovation happens when you target parts of long tail
| (margins)
|
| these points are expressed from social group problems
| perspective. My personal takeaway is that targeting
| marginalized groups can produce significant innovation.
| nicebyte wrote:
| while i agree with the spirit of the title, i find the specific
| conclusions dubious and the arguments presented unconvincing.
|
| if touch ui wasn't more convenient for _everybody_, it would
| remain a weird niche use case. so it's still building for the
| majority use case - it's just building the right thing, not a
| "faster horse", so to speak.
|
| the problem ive seen with data-driven design is overfocus on
| specific metrics, and the resulting tunnel vision leading to
| building "faster horses".
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