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At the foot of Deming’s fashionable quote, one can lay a great deal of responsibility for the dogmatic madness our age. | At the foot of Deming’s fashionable quote, one can lay a great deal of responsibility for the dogmatic madness our age. | ||
For if we accept the information content of the universe, through all time and space, is infinite,<ref>This assumes there is not a finite end-point to the Universe; by no means settled, but hardly a rash assumption. And given what we know, the universe’s total information content ''might as well be'' infinite when compared to our finite collection of mortal data.</ref> and the data homo sapiens has collected or generated to the point of reading is finite — this is necessarily so, even if we’ve lost quite a lot of it along the way — then it follows that the total value of [[data]] in which Deming would have us trust is, mathematically, ''as good as nil''. | For if we accept the information content of the universe, through all time and space, is infinite,<ref>This assumes there is not a finite end-point to the Universe; by no means settled cosmology, but hardly a rash assumption. And given what we know, the universe’s total information content ''might as well be'' infinite, when compared to our finite collection of mortal data. Even the total, ungathered-by-mortal-hand, information content generated by the whole universe ''to date'', not even counting the unknowable future, is as good as infinite.</ref> and the data homo sapiens has collected or generated to the point of reading is finite — this is necessarily so, even if we’ve lost quite a lot of it along the way — then it follows that the total value of [[data]] in which Deming would have us trust is, mathematically, ''as good as nil''. ''[[There is no data from the future]]''. | ||
And that is before considering the quality of the [[data]] we have managed to gather | And that is before considering the quality of the [[data]] we have managed to gather. If 90% of all data originates from the internet age,<ref>Eric Schmidt said something like this in 2011, and it sounds [https://blog.rjmetrics.com/2011/02/07/eric-schmidts-5-exabytes-quote-is-a-load-of-crap/ totally made up], but let’s run with it, hey?</ref> so a good portion is cat videos and hot takes on [[Twitter]] — so fairly ''shite'' data, even on its own terms. Have you ''read'' Twitter? | ||
But leave the banality of our age to one side — we don’t need it to make out the argument. It would hold even if every hot take on Twitter were an incandescent pearl of unique genius. | |||
In any case, it follows mathematically that, should we transcend our meagre [[hermeneutic]] bubbles — free the incarcerate race of {{sex|man}}, so to speak — the [[signal-to-noise ratio|signal]] of ''our'' data to the noise of all ''possible'' data out there is ''infinitesimal''.<ref>That means, ''really'' small.</ref> | |||
If this is the data we’re meant to trust, you might wonder what is so wrong with God. But we humans are [[The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning - Book Review|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 prisms and pre-existing cognitive structures to it —our hot takes, if you like — and willfully create patterns from it to support our convictions. | |||
This is | This is not a criticism about the human ''modus operandi'', but an observation. This is the doom our incarcerate race endures. | ||
All of these are another way of attacking a familiar problem: the world | It is not just the Twitterati. Science, too, has its [[confirmation bias]], that subsists at a meta-level, uncontrollable even by double-blind testing methodologies. Experiments which ''confirm'' a hypothesis are ''a lot'' more likely to be published than those which ''don’t''.<ref>{{br|The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals its Secrets}}, by Michael Blastland.</ref> Of those failed experiments that ''are'' published, far fewer are cited in other literature. [[Falsification]]s ''die''. | ||
This is neither a cause for alarm nor is it new. It is just a reminder how important, in all human discourse, is contingency, provisionality, and above all ''humility''. ''Your data is likely bunk''. | |||
All of these are another way of attacking a familiar problem: the universe, the world, the nation, your market, your workplace and even your interpersonal relationships are [[complex]], not merely [[complicated]]. [[Complication]] is a function of a [[paradigm]]. It is part of the game. It is within the rules. It is soluble, by sufficiently skilled application of the rules. Complication can be beaten by an algorithm. You can brute force it. | |||
[[Complexity]], you cannot. | [[Complexity]], you cannot. | ||
[[Complexity]], describes the ''limits'' of the [[paradigm]]. [[Complexity]] is the wilderness ''beyond'' the [[rules of the game]]. [[Complexity]] inhabits the noise, not the signal. Where there is complexity, ''the rules do not work''. | [[Complexity]], describes the ''limits'' of the [[paradigm]]. [[Complexity]] is the wilderness ''beyond'' the [[rules of the game]]. [[Complexity]] inhabits the noise, not the signal. Where there is complexity, ''the rules do not work''. Here ''data'' is relegated to ''noise''.<ref>Provisional hypothesis: “information” is data framed with a hypothesis. | ||
This is why physical sciences apparently have a greater success than social sciences — cue Richard Dawkins’ obligatory scoff. Physical sciences generally address behaviour of independent events — rolling balls, [[Coin flip|flipping coins]], waves [[and/or]] particles of light. But rolling balls are not autonomous agents. They act independently. The behaviour of one will not influence that of another. Each [[coin flip]] is, as a condition of probability theory — independent.<ref>The technical term: “platykurtic”.</ref> Independent events obey Gaussian principles. They may be modelled. That is to say, they may be [[complicated]] but they remain predictable, at least in theory. When physical systems inexplicably go bang — Chernobyl, the Space Shuttle Challenger, the ''Torrey Canyon'' — the root cause will not be a failure of the physical science underlying the engineering, but some supervening cause invalidating the underlying assumptions on which the physical science was based. | This is why physical sciences apparently have a greater success than social sciences — cue Richard Dawkins’ obligatory scoff. Physical sciences generally address behaviour of independent events — rolling balls, [[Coin flip|flipping coins]], waves [[and/or]] particles of light. But rolling balls are not autonomous agents. They act independently. The behaviour of one will not influence that of another. Each [[coin flip]] is, as a condition of probability theory — independent.<ref>The technical term: “platykurtic”.</ref> Independent events obey Gaussian principles. They may be modelled. That is to say, they may be [[complicated]] but they remain predictable, at least in theory. When physical systems inexplicably go bang — Chernobyl, the Space Shuttle Challenger, the ''Torrey Canyon'' — the root cause will not be a failure of the physical science underlying the engineering, but some supervening cause invalidating the underlying assumptions on which the physical science was based. | ||