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

The more data there is, the more you can process, the more [[neural network|neural networks]] can crawl over it, [[pattern matching]] and framing and analysing and the more “insight” — unexpected, machine-generated insight — we can extract.

But this insight is a function of the data: we can’t analyse or pattern-match data we don’t have — and what we do have we must select, filter, format, array and frame according to some pre-existing [[Narrative|theory of the game]]. Our data paints a picture from shadows: by blocking out “irrelevant” data we have collected but which doesn’t advance, bear upon or fit our theory. The more data we have, the more of it we must block to make a meaningful model.