Quote:
Lord_Bob said:
The actual hardest way to solve problems is to refuse to gather data. A quick search of the forum yields no threads attempting to gather data for at least the last eight months.
That is the very first thing I did.
|
I was not belittling your data gathering in the least. I appreciate and applaud your intentions and effort.
What I could see in the thread is that there were attempts to fit data to a theory/conclusion. That is what I was trying to avert.
I make my living solving problems in factories. A very long time ago I learned that there is a difference between data and numbers. One specific example I always give to my employees involved an intermittant major problem that plauged a firm for over three years. The president of the firm told me to get with "Joe Smith", that he had been working on the problem for 3 years and has tons of data, actually has piles of it over 4 ft. tall in his office and knows all about the problem.
I gave Joe Smith a curtesy visit, but the numbers he had were not data, and if he knew all about the problem he would have resolved it a long time ago. It took me over a month to figure it out, and naturally it was not related to any prior theory or conjecture.
Just gathering information is not the same as collecting data.