By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

So much of what is considered science today is really just art. It's a subjective interpretation of the meaning of data. Data does not speak for itself. It does not tell you cause and effect. It provides no predictive map for the future. It's often incorrect or merely a proximate rendering of the full reality. Even the best and most experienced experts and invested stakeholders cannot overcome this problem.

The implications of this insight are vast.

Let's start with an easy example.

Did you see Gladiator II? It had many of the same actors as the first movie that swept the awards and captivated audiences worldwide. It had bloody fight scenes. It had great music. It had creepy relationships, wicked power plays, feats of derring-do, displays of all kinds of cruelty and heroics, plus CGI of a recreated Roman Colosseum, this time with the floor flooded with water for a sea battle.

And yet the movie left audiences with not much. The experience was overall evaporative and the message elusive. The magic was missing. That special story arc of drama that swept us up in the first was strangely absent. At some point halfway through - and speaking as someone who loved the first - it struck me that I could walk away and not really care how it ended.

This often happens with sequels. It's not just because the directors and producers see an easy buck by roping in audiences to throw down for tickets, hoping to relive the experience of the first. Sequels are often a pale copy of the first because the producers, scriptwriters, and directors are themselves not entirely sure why the first one was great.

The movie makers can workshop this all day and for weeks. They can gather focus groups. They can talk to experts. They can pay the actors the big bucks. Everyone will have a theory, and they can try to recreate and reboot the thing as best they can. But at some point, no matter how hard they try and with many millions on the line, they leave the magical creative world of art and enter into the mundane task of recreation. With all their efforts, the drama is drained away.

No one knows for sure when or how that happens.

This example comes to mind in the midst of the continued meltdown over the logo change at Cracker Barrel. It seems obvious in retrospect that eliminating Uncle Herschel (a real person who was the uncle of the founder) and the barrel was a bad idea. It comes at a time of rising nostalgia and deep public suspicion of major corporations and their perceived attack on basic values.

Maybe it is not entirely clear why this one logo change would have ignited populist fury in normal times but when you consider the loss of trust in everything, this struck people as deeply offensive.

We learn from deeper reports on the decision that it was not arbitrary. The new CEO Julie Felss Masino, hired in 2023, was tasked with bringing back customers and the stock price after it was slammed during Covid lockdowns. That's a huge challenge for anyone, especially given the roaring inflation that followed the money printing of the period.

Julie reached into her communications undergraduate degree and her Master's of Business Administration and found a possible answer. The goal is to attract a younger generation. She had heard from her social set many times that the union of the word "cracker" with a white guy in overalls has racist overtones. Maybe it refers to cracking the whip. Maybe it is a signal that only whites are allowed. Maybe the overalls suggest it is only for farmers or aging nostalgists.

In any case, it seemed obvious to her that an update was in order.

Further, the executive team brought in focus groups. They did customer surveys. They assembled all the empirical evidence they could find. In the end, they discerned that they would win more with a change than they would lose from those who would miss the old sign. This intuition was further backed by a plan for interior changes. Down with all the bric-...