>To be sure, using data to argue about contentious policy issues should always prompt skepticism.
Death of journalism right there. Data be damned!
On a more serious note:
>"There is, indeed, a shortage of tech workers in the Bay Area."
That's because it's so darn expensive to live in the Bay Area, and almost impossible at the wages that tech companies generally want to pay for talent. They're knotting their own noose and standing on the chair, screaming that they'll kick it out from under them, really, for serial this time guys!, if they can't have cheap, underpaid talent to exploit.
You took that sentence out of context. This is the full paragraph:
> To be sure, using data to argue about contentious policy issues should always prompt skepticism. It's too easy to focus on particular aspects of any data analysis to prove one's point and overlook those items that may raise more questions.
It's a very valid point if you are not doing research but instead doing viewpoint validation.
Research is gathering all of the data you can in as much of an unbiased manner as you can and then asking what conclusions you can draw from that data. Viewpoint validation is starting from your conclusion and cherry picking data to support that conclusion. There is no evidence that viewpoint validation is what went on here, and in fact the article mentions later the rest of the data that was gathered and analysis of the points in the data that may contradict this conclusion.
However, the writer also spends most of his time saying, "Welp, there's all of this data, but can a brother get a programmer? Nope? INVALID CONCLUSION DOES NOT COMPUTE," which is a pretty shitty way to do journalism.
I really think you are misunderstanding that sentence. The author didn't mean what you think it means. His point was that it's not very difficult to come up with just the right data and statistics to support whatever idea you're trying to promote.
Data is basically worthless if you can't trust the methodology behind it.
That sentence was poorly written. What they mean, of course, is that you can't just blindly accept data, especially in a highly contentious debate.
The way they wrote it, yeah, it almost sounds like they think it's "bad" to rely on data in a policy issue. Kind of funny, but based on the rest of the paragraph, clearly not what they mean.
Kind of an aside here, but it drives me nuts when people quote "lies, damn lies, and statistics" or talk about "lying with statistics" as a way of dismissing data out of hand. Yes, anything that can be used to communicate can be used to lie. You can lie with words, that doesn't mean you should disregard any argument made with words! It just means you have to be careful - or, as this article put it, skeptical.
It is important to take a very careful look at data in a contentious argument. So I agree with them... sheesh, though, very badly phrased.
>To be sure, using data to argue about contentious policy issues should always prompt skepticism.
Death of journalism right there. Data be damned!
On a more serious note:
>"There is, indeed, a shortage of tech workers in the Bay Area."
That's because it's so darn expensive to live in the Bay Area, and almost impossible at the wages that tech companies generally want to pay for talent. They're knotting their own noose and standing on the chair, screaming that they'll kick it out from under them, really, for serial this time guys!, if they can't have cheap, underpaid talent to exploit.