Stijn Debrouwere’s Cargo cult analytics is a fantastic talk/essay on how we often get obsessed with meaningless data in the name of evidence-based decision-making. I don’t want to ruin it, because it’s one of those rare must-read pieces, but here’s a small taste:

Pageviews is a vanity metric: something that looks really important but that we can’t act on and that tell us nothing about how well we’re actually doing, financially or otherwise. […]

There’s nothing like a dashboard full of data and graphs and trend lines to make us feel like grown ups. Like people who know what they’re doing. So even though we’re not getting any real use out of it, it’s addictive and we can’t stop doing it.