Data modernism: Difference between revisions

“Data modernism” the controlling human mind does a different job: it no longer needs a pre-existing theory of the game: it delegates — or, at any rate, ''yields'' — that responsibility to a more or less ineffable ''[[algorithm]]''. the “controlling mind” need not know how, in the particular case, the algorithm works, how it gets to its conclusions, and is fixed with the conviction that, being the summed and filtered output of the collected [[wisdom of the crowd]], the algorithm has a greater intelligence than any “single controlling” mind anyway.

That time has now arrived, or is close at hand, whereby the means is at our disposal. We now have the processing power to take massive amounts of [[unstructured data]] — “[[noise]]” in the vernacular —  and from it extrapolate a [[Signal-to-noise ratio|signal]]. We don’t necessarily understand ''how'' the [[algorithm]]<nowiki/>s extrapolate a signal; they just do — this inscrutability is part of the appeal of it: there is no “all-too-human” bias<ref>At least, until the algo goes rogue and becomes a Nazi.</ref> — but there is a belief which stretches from paid-up Randian anarcho-capitalists through to certified latter-day socialists, that ''we can solve our problems with data''.

Now data, as it comes, is an incoherent, imperfect, meaningless thing. It is the pre-theatre chat;  a “hubbub”: made up of millions of individual communications, conversations and interactions actions, all of which have their own (possibly imperfect) meanings between their participants, but which taken as a whole have no particular meaning at all.

Imagine taking every one of the pre-performance conversations between all the patrons at the Saturday matinee performance of ''Eureka Day'' at The Old Vic<ref>Real-life example, needless to say.</ref> — that meaningless hubbub — and summarising it into a single sentence, designed to reflect what “the theatre was thinking”. ''Then'' you feed that  single confabulated sentence back to all the theatre patrons and say “this is the conversation which the theatre was having. Now, which side were you on?” People will tend to take sides, and will invest themselves in that conversation.

But, remember, the hubbub was just noise all along. None of the individual conversations had anything to do with each other. All had their own, independent meanings. They are ''immune'' to aggregation.

To extract signal from noise is to filter, limit compress and selectively amplify on the predication that there ''is'' a signal; that that hubbub is something like a de-tuned radio, or we are looking for pulsars, quasars and intelligent life on the SETI array. But we are not. There isn’t always a signal. the SETI array is a bad [[metaphor]]: here we are trying to tease out a bilateral signal that ''is'' there from a spectrum of other kinds of radiation that qualitatively different, but just broadcast on the same frequency. With the human hubbub there are a spectrum of unconnected communications and ''no'' real “signal”. We are not trying to isolate a single conversation out of all the other ones — that is the direct analogy — but trying to extract a an aggregated message that is not actually there, and to treat is as an [[Emergence|emergent]] property of all those conversations. This is a different thing entirely. ''There is no emergent property from millions of  unrelated conversations''. The result is brown, warm and even: maximum ''entropy''.