Max Shron > Quotes

“The four parts are the context of the project; the needs that the project is trying to meet; the vision of what success might look like; and finally what the outcome will be, in terms of how the organization will adopt the results and how its effects will be measured down the line.”
― Max Shron, Thinking with Data: How to Turn Information into Insights

“the “soft skills” are for making data useful. Determining what problem one is actually trying to solve, organizing results into something useful, translating vague problems or questions into precisely answerable ones, trying to figure out what may have been left out of an analysis, combining multiple lines or arguments into one useful result…the list could go on. These are the skills that separate the data scientist who can take direction from the data scientist who can give it, as much as knowledge of the latest tools or newest algorithms.”
― Max Shron, Thinking with Data: How to Turn Information into Insights

“Consider this incomplete list of things that can be made better with data: Answering a factual question Telling a story Exploring a relationship Discovering a pattern Making a case for a decision Automating a process Judging an experiment”
― Max Shron, Thinking with Data: How to Turn Information into Insights

“This book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 covers a framework for scoping data projects. Chapter 2 discusses how to pin down the details of an idea, receive feedback, and begin prototyping. Chapter 3 covers the tools of arguments, making it easier to ask good questions, build projects in stages, and communicate results. Chapter 4 covers data-specific patterns of reasoning, to make it easier to figure out what to focus on and how to build out more useful arguments. Chapter 5 takes a big family of argument patterns (causal reasoning) and gives it a longer treatment. Chapter 6 provides some more long examples, tying together the material in the previous chapters. Finally, there is a list of further reading in Appendix A, to give you places to go from here.”
― Max Shron, Thinking with Data: How to Turn Information into Insights

“To walk the path of creating things of lasting value, we have to understand elements as diverse as the needs of the people we’re working with, the shape that the work will take, the structure of the arguments we make, and the process of what happens after we “finish.” To make that possible, we need to give ourselves space to think. When we have space to think, we can attend to the problem of why and so what before we get tripped up in how.”
― Max Shron, Thinking with Data: How to Turn Information into Insights

“He set me off on this path as a kid when he patiently explained to me the idea of “metacognition,” or thinking about thinking. It would be hard to be grateful enough.”
― Max Shron, Thinking with Data: How to Turn Information into Insights