Signal-to-noise ratio

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Caught in a mesh of living veins,

In cell of padded bone,

He loneliest is when he pretends

That he is not alone.

We’d free the incarcerate race of man

That such a doom endures

Could only you unlock my skull,

Or I creep into yours.

Ogden Nash, Listen...

In God we trust, all others must bring data.

W. E. Deming

In this fashionable quote, originally by one can lay play a great deal of responsibility for the dogmatic madness our age.

That it is woven into Dominic Cummings lanyard might tell you something.

For if we we take it as a given that, to the best of our knowledge, the information content of the universe is infinite, and if we also recognise as as a truism that the amount of data collected racket or indeed generated closed bracket by homo sapiens to the point of reading is finite, then it follows that the total value of data in which Deming would have us trust is, mathematically, nil.

And that is before one considers the apparent quality of the data we have gathered — we hear 99% of it originates in the internet age, so a good portion is cat videos and hot takes on Twitter — in its own terms. But let us leave the the playing banality of our own age to one side.

In any case, if we transcend our meagre hermeneutic bubbles, the signal-to-noise ratio is infinitesimal.

Just on that statistic you might wonder what is so wrong with God. But human beings are pattern-seeking machines. We don’t take the data as we see it cold, and fashion objective axioms from it, carving nature at its joints: we bring our idiosyncratic prisons and pre-existing cognitive structures to it and willfully create suitable patterns from it to support our convictions. This is not a criticism, but an observation. This is the doom our incarcerate race endures.