The most accurate understanding of experience, the judgment of evidence, comes from medicine, because medicine is about our lives, and life doesn't allow for one chance to make a mistake. Believe, you go to the hospital, you would not want the doctor to say to you?" Oops, you are our first case of this disease and have become our test subject." You surely don't want the doctor to joke to you about such things.
In hospitals, doctors categorize empirical evidence into five levels, with the first being the most credible, and the second, third, fourth, and fifth, in descending order of credibility.
Experts or not, a doctor's personal experience falls into the fifth level of experience, which is the least credible. Only in the absence of other evidence do they choose to use their personal experience to see patients.
Level 4 experience, then, is somewhat more reliable. This is the before and after treatment comparison study.
The third level of experience is even more credible and is called a controlled study.
To see whether a treatment works or not, you have to compare it with a placebo. This is because the cure may not be the medicine, it may be psychological. Therefore, and placebo PK, in order to know whether the drug is effective.
The experience gained from randomized controlled studies is secondary experience. Doctors who can come up with secondary empirical evidence are very reliable. Even the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) looks at the results of randomized controlled trials when it reviews new drugs.
The second level of empirical evidence is very good, but it may be affected by factors such as region, ethnicity, and hygiene. For example, it's possible that Chinese people are good candidates for orthodontic extractions, but that experience may not be feasible in the United States.
So what to do?
This brings us to the first level of empirical evidence, called Meta-analysis (meta-analysis), which can also be understood as global big data analysis.
That is, take all the randomized controlled studies published around the world and evaluate them objectively using a set of scientific methods, so that the conclusions drawn are more reliable.
That's the first level of empirical evidence, it's the highest level of empirical evidence.
You see, finding empirical evidence in medicine is exactly the same process as when we do product development. At first, it is a theoretical study, similar experiences are summarized and analyzed to produce an inspiration, make a small sample, conduct experiments, the results of this experiment, we call it experimental preliminary experience, which is the fifth level of experience that we do products. This experience is still not very reliable.
Then we do some more samples to carry out repeated verification, if we verify the results are still reliable, then this time our experience will be richer, more sure that this method to do out of the product is reliable, so this time our experience will be upgraded to the fourth level of experience.
If we expand our experience further to mass production, we will need to make more comparative experiments to verify that our experience is the best method. Or remove some unnecessary and useless actions, then the resulting experience will be further upgraded to become the third level of experience. The third level of experience is already a very credible experience.
At this point, we put our products in the global production and processing, to promote, this process, our product development experience will be further improved, more in line with the actual global production conditions, human habits, etc., and constantly improve our experience in the global applicability. Product experience and knowledge become secondary experience. The second level of experience is already the sum of globalized product manufacturing experience, and it is already a very rare accumulation of knowledge.
What is Level 1 experience? It is to put all the secondary experience and then through the analysis of big data, refining extraction enhancement, and then the secondary experience for lean, refinement, theorization, visualization, automation, intelligence and so on. These extracted from the second level of experience, the first level of experience is the most credible, the most reliable, because he has a large number of experiments, global verification, have a long time repeated proof and confirmation.
The division of the five levels of experience helps you to sort out the process from a product whiz, to a product master, to a product guru!