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Now data, as it comes, is an incoherent, imperfect, meaningless thing. It is the pre-cinema audience chat before the lights go down;  a “hubbub” made up of millions of individual interactions, each of which has its own (possibly imperfect) meaning '''—''' but which aggregated taken as a whole have no particular meaning at all.
Now data, as it comes, is an incoherent, imperfect, meaningless thing. It is the pre-cinema audience chat before the lights go down;  a “hubbub” made up of millions of individual interactions, each of which has its own (possibly imperfect) meaning '''—''' but which aggregated taken as a whole have no particular meaning at all.


Imagine being asked to take that audience hubbub and condense it to a single proposition: “what was this audience thinking?”  But the interactions are unstructured, as between themselves random and disconnected. Obviously, there ''is'' no thread. But the machine nonetheless extracts one — spurious correlations or just some kind of frequency analysis pulls out some themes.
Now imagine being asked to take that audience hubbub and condense it to a single proposition: “what was this audience thinking?”  But the interactions are unstructured, as between themselves random and disconnected. Obviously, there ''is'' no thread.
 
But this is what the algorithm is supposedly doing when it extracts signal from noise. Selectively, it filters, limit, compresses and amplifies on the presumption that there ''is'' a signal to fund among noise; that all the conversations in that hubbub do boil down to some common sentiment, and that those which don’t are no more than noise: that the hubbub is something like a de-tuned radio, or the white noise on the SETI<ref>Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. You know, Jodie Foster in ''Contact''.</ref> data, buried within which are signals from pulsars, quasars and intelligent life.
 
But the hubbub is not like that. It can’t be reduced to prime factors. There is not a common signal. SETI is a bad [[metaphor]]: it tries to detect a single bilateral signal from a spectrum of other kinds of radiation that are not a signal, but are broadcast on the same frequency. With the human hubbub ''all there is is signal''. It is just that all the signals conflict, or miss each other, or bear no relation to each other at all. There are a spectrum of unconnected communications and ''no'' real “signal”. We are not trying to isolate a single conversation out of all the other ones — that is the direct analogy — but trying to extract a an aggregated message that is not actually there, and to treat is as an [[Emergence|emergent]] property of all those conversations. This is a different thing entirely.
 
''There is no 2 from millions of  unrelated conversations''. The result is brown, warm and even: maximum ''entropy''.
 
To make something out of nothing is to ''deliberately'' bias.  It is to carve David out of a marble block. Bias ''creates'' meaning. There may be ''local'' meanings — maybe — based on local interactions and echo chambers but these are informal, incomplete, and impossible to delimit.
But the machine nonetheless extracts one — spurious correlations or just some kind of frequency analysis pulls out some themes.


''Now imagine'' feeding that single confabulated sentence back to all the theatre patrons to say “this is the issue which the theatre was debating. Now, which side were you on?”  
''Now imagine'' feeding that single confabulated sentence back to all the theatre patrons to say “this is the issue which the theatre was debating. Now, which side were you on?”  
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We say “we have unconscious biases and they inform our reactions”. Well, no ''shit''.
We say “we have unconscious biases and they inform our reactions”. Well, no ''shit''.


To extract signal from noise is to filter, limit compress and selectively amplify on the predication that there ''is'' a signal; that that hubbub is something like a de-tuned radio, or we are looking for pulsars, quasars and intelligent life on the SETI array.


But we are not. There isn’t always a signal. the SETI array is a bad [[metaphor]]: here we are trying to tease out a bilateral signal that ''is'' there from a spectrum of other kinds of radiation that qualitatively different, but just broadcast on the same frequency. With the human hubbub there are a spectrum of unconnected communications and ''no'' real “signal”. We are not trying to isolate a single conversation out of all the other ones — that is the direct analogy — but trying to extract a an aggregated message that is not actually there, and to treat is as an [[Emergence|emergent]] property of all those conversations. This is a different thing entirely. ''There is no emergent property from millions of  unrelated conversations''. The result is brown, warm and even: maximum ''entropy''.
To make something out of nothing is to ''deliberately'' bias.  It is to carve David out of a marble block. Bias ''creates'' meaning. There may be ''local'' meanings — maybe — based on local interactions and echo chambers but these are informal, incomplete, and impossible to delimit.


So we tend to “extrapolate” central figures from random noise: economic growth. The intention behind expressed electoral preference. Average wages. The wage gap. Why the stock market went up. ''That'' the stock market went up: these are spectral figures. They are ghosts, gods, monsters and devils. They are no more real than religions, just because they are the product of “science” and “techne”.
So we tend to “extrapolate” central figures from random noise: economic growth. The intention behind expressed electoral preference. Average wages. The wage gap. Why the stock market went up. ''That'' the stock market went up: these are spectral figures. They are ghosts, gods, monsters and devils. They are no more real than religions, just because they are the product of “science” and “techne”.
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