It’s Ben Huh, the brains behind FAIL Blog, Engrish Funny, and, of course, I Can Has Cheezburger. The best of the user-generated-content sites. Huh is profiled here in Fast Company. Interestingly, he’s a quant guy:

[W]e rely on the tools of the Internet — metrics and measurements and stuff like that — to help us decide what to post. We don’t have some guy somewhere deciding, “Oh, I think this it funny. I’m going to post it on the homepage.” That actually fails 50% of the time, because people are very bad at understanding what’s funny for other people. Everything we promote is there for a logical reason.

The WSJ recently ran a sort of anti-Moneyball piece on the NBA’s Denver Nuggets that belongs in our “by the numbers” series. Love the title: “Textbook Management? Hardly. — Assembled Largely by Instinct, the Denver Nuggets Keep Winning; Mastering a ‘Curious Business.’” Here’s the central passage:

[The Nuggets] don’t describe their success as the inevitable result of a carefully designed strategy. Rather, in an era when sports executives like to play themselves off as masters of mathematical analysis and risk management — and in a year when most NBA teams chose fiscal prudence over expensive superstars — the Nuggets are an anomaly. They owe their success to a bizarre combination of luck, good health, opportunism and a management strategy that is more six-shooter than Six Sigma.

The story caught my eye partly because it profiles Nuggest owner Stan Kroenke, a real estate developer who lives here in Columbia, Missouri and whose son Josh was Mizzou’s starting shooting guard from 2000 to 2003. (Stan’s wife also happens to be Ann Walton Kroenke, one of Sam Walton’s two nieces; it’s nice to have connections!)

A new item for our “by the numbers” series. Former Google lead designer Doug Bowman recently quit to take a position at Twitter, citing frustration with Google’s engineer-oriented, data-driven culture:

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. . . .

I’ll miss working with the incredibly smart and talented people I got to know there. But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.

Adds Keith Sawyer:

Google’s engineer-dominated culture wants to see the numbers, the proof.  Artists and designers don’t think that way — they know a design that works in their gut, somehow, when they see it.  It’s a holistic phenomenon, and it emerges in some unpredictable way from hundreds of tiny design decisions about line widths and color shades.  How, they would ask, could you possibly test every single combination, every possible design? . . . Numbers get you focused on the trees and you forget you’re inside of a forest.

I hold to the basic Misesian position that quantitative empirical analysis is a complement to, not a substitute for, other forms of knowledge acquisition such as a priori theorizing and Verstehen. Needless to say, this doesn’t mean I approve of fuzzy constructs in social-science research.