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Oversimplify

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A competent data scientist can make models and plots. A great data scientist can also help make decisions. Making a decision requires confidence. Uncertainty is the enemy of confidence. Uncertainty hurts. Like a splinter under a fingernail, it makes us squirm. Feeling unsure what to expect or what to do keeps us awake nights. Recommending an action to your CEO takes the pain of uncertainty away from them. Giving a simple prediction to your customers gives them the confidence they need to decide their next move. The way to give confidence is to oversimplify. Oversimplifying isn't complicated, but it takes care. Here's how: Following these steps will inevitably result in an oversimplified document. Subtleties will be neglected. Caveats and corner cases will be omitted. What ifs will be left out. That's OK. Reducing uncertainty is a tricky business. The closer you look at something the less certain it becomes. The scaffolding of assumptions that any analysis is built on is subject to ques

A competent data scientist can make models and plots. A great data scientist can also help make decisions. Making a decision requires confidence. Uncertainty is the enemy of confidence. Uncertainty hurts. Like a splinter under a fingernail, it makes us squirm. Feeling unsure what to expect or what to do keeps us awake nights. Recommending an action to your CEO takes the pain of uncertainty away from them. Giving a simple prediction to your customers gives them the confidence they need to decide their next move. The way to give confidence is to oversimplify. Oversimplifying isn't complicated, b

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