Substance and form

An existential dilemma — indeed a paradox — first adverted to in the libretto of Puttanesca Rigatoni’s now largely forgotten comic opera La Vittoria della Forma sulla Sostanza (often performed, if performed at all, in German, as Die Eroberung der Form durch Substanz) the modern world is blighted by the comforting embrace of tickable boxes, checkable checklists, and auditable trails, all of which give their comfort by the easy road: rather than evaluate the qualities of your organisation, tally up its countable dimensions, however superficial they are.

There is a logic to this: the power of big data is their emergent properties: you can extract from a mass of data qualities you can’t see from individual instances. That one kettle goes on at 4:30 in the afternoon signifies nothing in particular; that fourteen million do tells you it’s half time in the football.

This is a correlation, not a causation, and it won't flow the other way. Just because you put the kettle on at 4:30 in the afternoon, and so did a million football watchers, that doesn't mean you were watching the football. Probability is an is, not an ought.

See also

• Closely related to the technology paradox