Hitchhiker’s Guide to Analytics — Perspective
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book, more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes, and Who Is This God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom.
It starts like this:
It can be difficult to understand the enormity of the universe through observation. Our little galaxy is over 100,000 light years side to side.
The record for hitchhiking from one side to the other is just under five years, but you don’t get to see much along the way.
Go outside tonight. Look at the stars. The distance is incomprehensible and almost meaningless (unless you’re into astronomy).
We might know that space is huge, but we cannot really feel it.
One man changed that, and he did it basically to annoy his wife.
Sense of proportion
Nothing in the galaxy invokes more dread than the Total Perspective Vortex. It destroys the mind. It can reduce the bravest and most confident being to a mere shell of itself, lost beyond hope or even tears.
It’s also brilliant in its simplicity.
The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analysis.
To explain: since every piece of matter in the universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition, and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
Trin Tragula was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. She would nag him incessantly about wasting time with his thoughts and experiments and spectrographic analyses of fairy cake.
“Have some sense of proportion!”, she would say.
So, Trig built the Total Perspective Vortex, just to show her. Into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife. When he turned it on, she saw in one instant the whole majestic infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula’s horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain, but, to his satisfaction, he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
Extrapolation
Seriously, the idea is brilliant. Extrapolation of every single thing in the entire universe, in relation to one another, from a single piece of fairy cake.
I mean, the model is probably wrong, but let us consider two salient facts:
- It serves the purpose for which it was designed
- It might be dead accurate
You can laugh at that second point, but you cannot disprove it. The universe is too big and too complex for a precise comparison. Still, it doesn’t matter a whit if the model is 100% accurate as long as it faithfully makes the point.
The Total Perspective Vortex destroys minds because it shows people, with neither malice nor prejudice, their literal place in existence.
Perspective
What can we learn today?
Perspective is essential in analytics. It’s actually essential in everything, but I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life.
Most people resist anything that pulls them out of their own viewpoint and tries to introduce a broader perspective. It won’t necessarily shatter their soul like the Total Perspective Vortex, but the parallels are chilling.
While you should always strive for accuracy, the purpose of an analytic model is to produce meaningful and actionable insights. It should reflect reality but does not always need to recreate it 100% faithfully.
Look, I really do not like the word actionable, but I’m using it here. That should tell you something about the importance of that last sentence. I wanted something a bit stronger than ‘useful’ to make the point.
Never underestimate the impact of relating your model to the people using it. No one would care about the Total Perspective Vortex if it showed their neighbor’s place in existence.
You should maintain a healthy sense of proportion. You should not let it bother you. No one around here is the center of the universe.
Finally, fairy cake is the key to existence. Try to prove me wrong.
For more lessons from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Analytics…
