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Comment by andrewjf | Hacker News Reader

Apple relies on intuition and experience and uses data to support decisions, or not (and data be regularly overruled). Rarely does pure data drive decisions. People coming from other companies usually fail if they can’t adapt to a “data second” mentality.

I feel like Apple’s method is much better than blindly trying to interpret data and let that drive you over the cliff. Data isn’t a replacement for understanding of your product and users.

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Are you aware of the work by Meehl on actuarial vs. clinical judgment? One of the conclusions of that line of work is that fairly dumb, mechanical data-driven rules ("actuarial judgment") consistently outperform expert opinion ("clinical judgment") even on what we think of as fairly complex topics.

The more surprising conclusion is that the dumb, data-driven rules outperform experts even when the experts get access to the same data and the decision made by the data-driven rule. Why? Humans have a tendency to think they're better than dumb rules and override these dumb rules in ways that make their decision ultimately worse.

I haven’t, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that conclusion doesn’t apply in creative fields.

The funny thing is that people say that about every field, yet one by one, Meehl and the people doing work along the same lines consistently disprove them.

The result has remained remarkably consistent across many fields where people were sure it wouldn't apply. At this point it's stable enough that I think the conclusion is a good base assumption, and it would take serious evidence to show that it does not apply in any given field.

What is a creative field ? Can you write a novel this way ?

That's interesting. I was actually just guessing that Apple is not data driven.

I would be grateful if you can share Apples general approach to product development.

The closest publicly available info is an HBR article about Apple’s organizational structure:

https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...

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