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===It is bad=== | ===It is bad=== | ||
Not only (per our careful argument at [[signal-to-noise-ratio]]) is the overall quantity of data we have skewed in time and practically nil in quantity, the quality data in of our tawdry collection is poor. And not just in its profusion of cat videos and hot takes on Twitter, either. For, as the evolutionary record, it contains all the errors and the one successful trial; all the abandoned drafts, all the false starts, all the typos, [[split infinitive]]s, tendentious arguments, feeble caveats and needless [[for the avoidance of doubt|avoidances of doubt]]. The data we have, that is, even on our own rationalised terms, mainly noise. | Not only (per our careful argument at [[signal-to-noise-ratio]]) is the overall quantity of data we have skewed in time and practically nil in quantity, the quality data in of our tawdry collection is poor. And not just in its profusion of cat videos and hot takes on Twitter, either. For, as the evolutionary record, it contains all the errors and the one successful trial; all the abandoned drafts, all the false starts, all the typos, [[split infinitive]]s, tendentious arguments, feeble caveats and needless [[for the avoidance of doubt|avoidances of doubt]]. The data we have, that is, even on our own rationalised terms, mainly noise. | ||
And even so, we self-select to eschew ''good'' noise, as being worthless: scientific journals do not publish accounts of research programmes that turn out badly, and of those which turn out well, little mention remains of the failed hypotheses leading up to the Eureka moment. At the same time, trials who needs to know about all the experiments that didn’t work, even though that is good noise, with real information content: do not try this again) | |||
===Noise=== | |||
There are two kinds of noise. There is ''good'' noise: random, valid information that is just not the information you are looking for, but is broadcast on the same frequency (background radiation, cosmic chatter, cocktail party [[hubbub]] — hundreds of other perfectly meaningful exchanges; just not the one you are interested in) and there is ''bad'' noise: errors, mistakes, hot takes on Twitter and so on. | |||
===It is illiberal=== | ===It is illiberal=== | ||
Second, in its [[reductionism]], in its funnelling of a dispersed population into an essential homogeneity, it speaks to the underlying belief in a grand unifying theory of everything: a transcendent ''truth''. This, in the [[JC]]’s view, is a profoundly illiberal idea: to be unable to accommodate pluralism is to ''deny'' of pluralism. | Second, in its [[reductionism]], in its funnelling of a dispersed population into an essential homogeneity, it speaks to the underlying belief in a grand unifying theory of everything: a transcendent ''truth''. This, in the [[JC]]’s view, is a profoundly illiberal idea: to be unable to accommodate pluralism is to ''deny'' of pluralism. | ||