Gordon Kamer

Stop Using Data Alone to Make Decisions

by
Stop Using Data Alone to Make Decisions

During the Vietnam War, Harvard Business School graduate and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara insisted that the war be fought with modern statistical methods — what would today be called “data science.” As a part of the “hamlet evaluation system,” Department of Defense officials would take every bit of information from the frontlines, quantify it, … Read more

Finding the Future in the Past

by

I do not mean to disparage my graduate student teaching fellow, who has done a fine job developing a curriculum for my government course on technology in international relations. The problem in the development of his curriculum does not come from his beliefs, per se, but rather, from the core assumptions of the academic milieu … Read more