Harvard Magazine reports big data is big business at the university, with students and faculty of all kinds taking up courses in data science. Qualitative experts are getting together with statisticians and finding quick, high quality routes to new results: “Whenever sufficient information can be quantified, modern statistical methods will outperform an individual or small group of people every time.”
Let's hold on that precondition: “Whenever sufficient information can be quantified”. You know what I'm going to say. It's not just that someone has to have counted, measured or gathered the information of interest. They must also have assembled the data according to a standard that gives it the correct meaning.
There's also a danger we will choose increasingly to work with the data we have, rather than the data we need. There's a perception that the world is drowning in data that can be turned to useful account with a little statistical genius. But lose an airliner one day and you soon realize we only really have the data we actively seek. By-product data is great when it's there, but it's not everywhere.
It's like projecting terrorist organizations from cellphone calls. You don't have to go out into the marketplace and make contacts. But you get a skewed view of the enemy – which is dedicated to flying under whatever kind of radar you use to detect them.
Harvard people are smart. They know data without theory is useless. I hope the students flocking to data analysis realize data isn't a natural force, or an inevitable by-product of modern life. We still need to identify, source, and care for, data. Data is actually a scare resource, no matter how big the numbers sound. Harvard Magazine
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