The dark side of an operations researcher. Or how operations research can be a funny subject. Wanna join me?.
"The early anatomists of the human body suffered from a shortage of fresh cadavers to work on. Medical students would trek long distances to watch a dissection performed. Economists often find themselves in a similar predicament. Short of good empirical meat, they have to rely on elaborate theory and guesswork to fill in what they cannot observe."
From The Economist print edition, Dec 30th 2008.
Decision Science ain’t to take the mickey. DS is very useful, with many applications and methodologies. However, sometimes we can find ourselves puzzled. I imagine this must be like when I explain what Business Strategy is, considering it a mix of SCIENCE with a hint of ART. I already talked about this [here], comparing the OR-ers with ARTISTS. This sounds cool…
…but now we’re getting really into the dark side of OR: Poppelaars’ OR at Work reveals us the secret in ‘Forecasting: Witchcraft or Science?‘.
