Barack Obama’s win and all the discussion about a “Post-Racial” era in America made me think that we might be entering the end of binary thinking. Which is the why i am titling my new blog "the end of binary thinking"
The fascinating element about Barack Obama is that he is not easily classified in simple, binary terms, especially in regards to his race, upbringing and personal history. He is less the one or the other but sort of like me, a mix of a lot of different things. He is black and white, he is American but he grew up in foreign countries, he is a guy from Chicago but he only moved to Chicago in his twenties, he is an elitist and intellectual but he was a community organizer as well
Most the analytics teams I work with or those guys i meet informally as frenemies think and model in binary terms. It’s either 1 or 0, you are either in segment 1 or in segment 2, the campaign has either worked or not. The origin of this approach resides in the long tradition of philosophy of dualism and binaries. It’s tough to snap out of that, especially for mathematically trained brains who believe that everything can be reduced to a 1 and 0 formula, as any computer program is proof of.
But life is rarely truly binary, and the models that we are building should attempt to reflect this - life more accurate by moving beyond a simple binary structure. It’s often more useful to think less in opposites than in a continuum of elements, less in strong colors than in shades of something. Things are rarely true of false but more often a bit truer or a bit more false.
1 comment:
I have to disagree. As someone who works in this space I'd say everything we do is and has always been about shades of black and white. The underlying tool we use is statistics which is all about probability and understanding how confident you can be that the answer is A not B....very rarely is it 0 or 1.
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