Polls are frequently taken to try to tease out or determine likely directions and trends, but once taken, they belong to the past, requiring that new polls be taken.
Filing is concerned with the past; anything you actually need to see again has to do with the future.
How can you make sense of the future when you only have data about the past?
The whole enterprise of teaching managers is steeped in the ethic of data-driven analytical support. The problem is, the data is only available about the past. So the way we've taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyze problems condemns them to taking action when it's too late.
The biggest mistake is an over-reliance on data. Managers will say if there are no data they can take no action. However, data only exist about the past. By the time data become conclusive, it is too late to take actions based on those conclusions.
While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.
When you try to predict future E.R.A.'s with past E.R.A.'s, you're making a mistake.
Running a company on market research is like driving while looking in the rear view mirror.
While statistics are interesting, they're all in the past.
You want to evaluate future borrowers, but in order to train an algorithm that will help you identify future defaults, you have to train it and evaluate it on past data.
