From hard science to baseless opinions: where did we go wrong?
summary
Argument that tech debate often lacks evidence and borrows postmodern relativism, illustrated by a computer-vision paper with 40 citations and an ASOS ops claim about scale and $1.5B turnover; examples of failure include Edison diagnostics that passes headlines but performs at less than 7% of conventional tests, a literature review that finds only 180 empirical studies on programming, a binomial availability calculation for containers versus VMs, and a health-endpoint vs monitoring experiment that shows API checks cannot substitute holistic observability.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction and context
- 3:23From medicine to tech
- 5:13How we make decisions
- 6:38Opinions in tech culture
- 9:08Postmodernism’s influence
- 13:53Bad decisions in tech
- 16:27Tech culture’s impact
- 19:47Scientific method in tech
- 22:42Changing behavior
- 23:03Containers and availability
- 26:23Logic over opinions
- 29:13Turning tide in objectivity
- 29:57Forefathers of IT
- 32:56Conclusion and takeaways
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