Usefulness of some techniques may depend on domain where one wants to use them. For example a technique “if you don’t know something, use google and follow 3 highest links” depends on whether your problems are described on internet, and how much trustworthy are those answers. -- For “how do I join two strings in Python?” this technique works great. For financial questions, not so great, because website owners have a huge incentive to promote wrong answers.
Also, the same technique may have different results for different kinds of people, because of their environment, previous knowledge, personality, gender, social class, financial situation, or whatever. If you omit those details, you only get average results in general population, which is also not bad, but does not lead to optimal choice.
Measuring an impact of a technique is difficult. How much sure are you it was this technique that helped, and not something else? Maybe it was a placebo effect or just a coincidence. If we had hundreds of data points, the coincidences would average out, but we probably won’t have so much data.
Usefulness of some techniques may depend on domain where one wants to use them. For example a technique “if you don’t know something, use google and follow 3 highest links” depends on whether your problems are described on internet, and how much trustworthy are those answers. -- For “how do I join two strings in Python?” this technique works great. For financial questions, not so great, because website owners have a huge incentive to promote wrong answers.
Also, the same technique may have different results for different kinds of people, because of their environment, previous knowledge, personality, gender, social class, financial situation, or whatever. If you omit those details, you only get average results in general population, which is also not bad, but does not lead to optimal choice.
Measuring an impact of a technique is difficult. How much sure are you it was this technique that helped, and not something else? Maybe it was a placebo effect or just a coincidence. If we had hundreds of data points, the coincidences would average out, but we probably won’t have so much data.