Powerful Ideas And Poor Conclusions

 

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Over the holidays Seth Godin decried some lazy analysis in a NYT piece which used the proportion of positive and negative reviews on Amazon to attempt to make the case that Amazon was failing its customers with the latest version of the Kindle. I'm not a Kindle fan, but he listed some good reasons for questioning the conclusions of the piece including this lovely little insight:

"Amazon reviews never reflect the product, they reflect the passion people have for the product. As Jeff Bezos has pointed out again and again, most great products get 5 star and 1 star reviews. That makes sense... why would you be passionate enough about something that's sort of 'meh' to bother writing a three star review?"

I'd like to add another to the list - the fact that it is almost without exception a small proportion of users on a site who account for the largest proportion of reviews or ratings, meaning the overall picture can be easily distorted and seem overly positive or negative. As proved by some research published late last year  that studied the pattern of user-generated reviews across several sites including Amazon, IMDb and Bookcrossing. Standout ideas always generate polarity of opinion. But given our human tendencies toward bias, to see patterns where none exist, to do what other humans do, this is a timely reminder of the dangers of taking simple data at face value.

Comments

[Brett T T Macfarlane]

Reminds me of an old Bernbachism that went something along the lines of - if you stand for something you will have people for you and against you but if you stand for nothing you will have nobody against you and nobody with you.

[neilperkin]

Nice one Brett - always got time for some Bernbach :-)

[Rob @ Cynic]

If you don't stand for something, you might fall for anything ...

I love extreme points of view, you learn far more than passive-middle-of-the-road comments ... but then I believe anger is energy.

[neilperkin]

Hey Rob. Happy New Year to you. Totally agree. "Anger is an energy" - that's a PiL lyric as well I think...

[Rob]

It is - it's also cynic's formal planning philosophy. Thank you Mr Lydon, ha!