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Thirdly, to embrace all the data you can find is to degrade the [[signal-to-noise ratio]]. Even if you buy into the incoherent [[reductionist]] idea that the “signal” is some kind of transcendent truth, by industrialising your data, you risk burying it and if you don’t — if like we pluralists you see ''any'' signal as not just a suitable narrative for your present purposes, the more data you gather, the more possible narratives — conflicting narratives; [[incommensurable]] narratives — you will have. Now this is, for a pluralist, is a good thing: every narrative is a tool in your workshop, the more you have the better you are equipped to deal with the [[unknown unknown]]s our [[complex]] world will surely throw at us — but that tends ''not'' to be what big data disciples are after. | Thirdly, to embrace all the data you can find is to degrade the [[signal-to-noise ratio]]. Even if you buy into the incoherent [[reductionist]] idea that the “signal” is some kind of transcendent truth, by industrialising your data, you risk burying it and if you don’t — if like we pluralists you see ''any'' signal as not just a suitable narrative for your present purposes, the more data you gather, the more possible narratives — conflicting narratives; [[incommensurable]] narratives — you will have. Now this is, for a pluralist, is a good thing: every narrative is a tool in your workshop, the more you have the better you are equipped to deal with the [[unknown unknown]]s our [[complex]] world will surely throw at us — but that tends ''not'' to be what big data disciples are after. | ||
===It is not a [[universal affirmative]]=== | ===It is not a [[universal affirmative]]=== | ||
Even if, from pure data, you ''could'' establish the causal relationship between data you have observed and an event that drives it (it is axiomatic that you ''can’t'': you can only derive a [[correlation]], and we know how spurious ''those'' can be) you still can’t conclude that the cause propelling the ''general'' compelled any ''particular''. | Even if, from pure data, you ''could'' establish the causal relationship between data you have observed and an event that drives it (it is axiomatic that you ''can’t'', by the way: you can only derive a [[correlation]], and we know how spurious ''those'' can be) you still can’t conclude that the cause propelling the ''general'' is the same one that compelled any ''particular''. | ||
[[Averages]] are crappy things to aspire to, or configure your business to, for a number of reasons . | |||
Because the machinations of statistics can, in certain contexts, inflame the passions of the righteous, the JC has devised the [[parable of the squirrels]] to tease this out. | |||
{{sa}} | {{sa}} | ||
*[[Signal-to-noise ratio]] | *[[Signal-to-noise ratio]] | ||
*[[In God we trust, all others must bring data]] | *[[In God we trust, all others must bring data]] | ||