This is collective intelligence?

One of the more disappointing lessons of fake grad school is the validity of subjective work in objective fields and an total over valuing of collective opinions. You get taught to force your models to report similar values as everyone else's because failure to do so could get you noticed, and getting you noticed could get you fired. So you learn alot about manipulating assumptions to forcing "better" results out of your spreadsheet. There's even a whole culture around rationalizing this process as a pseudo-probabilistic enhancement by creating nonsense "scenarios".

So it's nice to see one analyst (Mary Meeker) get busted not once, but twice on fudging the facts and math to create a model for YouTube advertising that justifies the incredible $1.6B valuation it got from Google. First she gets the definition of CPM wrong, resulting in a projection that's , oh, 3 orders of magnitude off, then in correcting that mistake, we're too believe she spontaneously discovered that her assumptions were (gasp!) too conservative, by, oh 3 orders of magnitude -- so the original estimate wasn't that wrong to begin with! Amazing that.

This isn't the first time accusations of sloppiness (laziness?) have followed our intrepid analysis, a lot of her analysis from the late 90s that looked a lot like fraud in hindsite to a lot of people (though Meeker was never accused of anything other than being completely wrong). Mistakes like that resulting in massive class action suites and Elliot Spitzer becoming Govenor of New York. I will be interesting to see what happens this time.

Maybe its time business schools stop teaching scenario-ing and started teaching actual statistics before someone, you know, goes to jail.