We tend to gravitate to the sensational, hence why nightly news shows are filled with stories of rape and murder and conspiracy, we know deep down it’s wrong, yet we can’t look away. When we get sucked into this world of mystery and intrigue, we tend to throw out logic and believe anything that is flashed before our eyes.
Welcome 2012. The year the world will end. Well, according to popular Mayan belief. But was it really their belief that the world would end on December 21, 2012?
Popular theories of the Mayan’s prediction of the end of the world are based on a very limited set of artifacts. Many believe the Mayans predicted the end of the world based on evidence found in a single book and a set of stone discs. What if the set of discs was incomplete? What if the book was part of a larger volume?
Is this a fair representation of what the Mayan culture believed? Imagine if 10,000 years from now, archeologists discover a single book, containing the story of Hansel and Gretel, while unearthing a public library in Upstate New York. Would it be fair to say that, based on this finding, people that lived circa 1800-2500 lived in houses made purely of a sugar based substance, sometimes baked, other times not, and whose children were susceptible to being eaten by hunched over old ladies wearing over-sized black hats?
Yet, we do this all the time when we analyze the behavior of our web site visitors. We take a nugget of information, a singular fact, and from that we generalize a grand explanation for how an entire system works. I have been guilty of this way of thinking many times.
If we can take one lesson from the apocalyptic hype surrounding the year 2012, it is that we as analysts should be careful about getting sucked into the emotion of sensational news. Rather than becoming overly excited about the first artifact we uncover, we should center ourselves and logically look at all the information we have available to us. We should continue to dig for more truths. And, we should be slow to profess universal truths based on a limited set of data.
Adam Greco
Emer Kirrane
Eric Peterson
Evan LaPointe
Kevin Rogers
Michele Hinojosa
Pritesh Patel
Rudi Shumpert
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