Template:Data as a self-fulfilling prophecy: Difference between revisions

Jump to navigation Jump to search

Template:Data as a self-fulfilling prophecy (view source)

Revision as of 08:45, 13 October 2023

505 bytes added ,  13 October 2023
no edit summary
No edit summary
No edit summary
Line 1: Line 1:
{{quote|
{{quote|
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
:—Miles Kington}}There is, the JC freely narratises, an epochal battle raging between ''wisdom'' and ''technocracy'' which the technocrats have, for thirty years, been winning. As we are gradually immersed in the superficial charm of technology, it feels like an end-game: there is no way out for the [[meatware]]: no titanic clash, no great final conflict  — just a feeble whimpering out of human expertise, finally beaten down by the irrepressible energy of the algorithm. The latest front, [[artificial intelligence]], feels like a ''coup de grace'' the inevitable endpoint of human uselessness. ''[[Weisendämmerung]]'': the twilight of the wise.
:—Miles Kington}}
There is, the JC freely narratises, an [[Der Sieg der Form über Substanz|epochal battle raging between ''wisdom'' and ''technocracy'']] which the technocrats have, for thirty years, been winning. As we are gradually immersed in the superficial charm of technology, it feels like an end-game: there is no way out for the [[meatware]]: no titanic clash, no great final conflict  — just a feeble whimpering out of human expertise, finally beaten down by the irrepressible energy of the algorithm. The latest front, [[artificial intelligence]], feels like a ''coup de grace'' the inevitable endpoint of human uselessness.  


Wisdom only comes with time, experience and anecdotally-accumulated expertise. It is hard to acquire and expensive to buy. Technocracy, by contrast requires brute information processing capacity — which grows ever cheaper — and enough information to process — which grows ever more abundant.
''[[Weisendämmerung]]'': the twilight of the wise.


The more data there is, the more you can process, the more neaural networks can crawl over it, pattern matching and framing and analysing and the more “insight” — unexpected, machine-generated insight — we can extract.  
Wisdom only comes with time, experience and anecdotally-accumulated expertise. It is hard to acquire and expensive to buy.  


But this insight is necessarily derivative of the data collected — axiomatically, you can’t analyse data you don’t have — and what you do have must be filtered, formatted, arrayed and framed according to some or other narrative. Data paints a picture from shadows: by blocking light from whatever light we have.  
Technology, by contrast requires ''no'' time and ''no'' expertise: only brute information processing capacity — which gets ever cheaper — and enough data to process — which gets ever more abundant.


We don’t know how experts do what they do — that ineffability is their expertise — until
The more data there is, the more you can process, the more neural networks can crawl over it, [[pattern matching]] and framing and analysing and the more “insight” — unexpected, machine-generated insight — we can extract.
they acquire tools to help them — ''digital'' tools — and they make us lazy, at the same pushing experts towards activities that generate metadata (the tools don’t help with ineffable stuff that doesn’t generate metadata) that the technocrats can collect. (A conversation across the desk is purely analog; it contains no recordable data or metadata; a typed letter is an analog artefact with no emetadata; a facsimile is a digital graphic of an analog artefact with limited extractable data or metadata; an electronically transmitted ASCII document is ''only'' data, and has no meaningful analog existence at all)
 
But this insight is a function of the data we collect — you can’t analyse or pattern-match data you don’t have — and what you do have must be filtered, formatted, arrayed and framed according to some or other narrative. Data paints a picture from shadows: by blocking part of whatever light we have. The more light we have, the more we must block to make a meaningful model.
 
So, dilemma: the ''less'' data we have, the stronger the model, but the less reliable the insight, because we don’t know what we’re missing. The ''more'' data, the weaker the model, and the less reliable the insight, because we still don’t know what we’re missing, but the more of what we do know we have had to rule out to draw a single coherent model.
 
We don’t know how experts do what they do — that ineffability is their expertise — until they acquire tools to help them — ''digital'' tools — and they make us lazy, at the same pushing experts towards activities that generate metadata (the tools don’t help with ineffable stuff that doesn’t generate metadata) that the technocrats can collect. (A conversation across the desk is purely analogue; it contains no recordable data or metadata; a typed letter is an analogue artefact with no metadata; a facsimile is a digital graphic of an analogue artefact with limited extractable data or metadata; an electronically transmitted ASCII document is ''only'' data, and has no meaningful analogue existence at all)


And as the talent loses, we succumb to data, increasingly giving it off, great clods of it, which the technocrats then harvest and weaponise back at us in some self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecy. No matter that the data are necessarily historical: a formalistic digital sketch of a model; they can only see what they can see: they cannot measure of the value of actions not taken, crises headed off; investment costs avoided through quick thinking and untraced application of human common sense, because necessarily, ''there is no data about did not happen''.  
And as the talent loses, we succumb to data, increasingly giving it off, great clods of it, which the technocrats then harvest and weaponise back at us in some self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecy. No matter that the data are necessarily historical: a formalistic digital sketch of a model; they can only see what they can see: they cannot measure of the value of actions not taken, crises headed off; investment costs avoided through quick thinking and untraced application of human common sense, because necessarily, ''there is no data about did not happen''.  
Retrieved from "https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Special:MobileDiff/78932"

Navigation menu