Data, Humans on the Side

Good things - The recent PBS show The Human Side of Data has much to recommend it. As someone who labors in the big data vineyard as a reporter and commentator, I appreciate its succinct high level view on one of the defining memes of now. I had the chance to speak with my colleague Ed Burns on the topic for the Talking Data Podcast, and thought I’d add to the discussion here.

There were some beautiful animated pictures of data crossing the world – be it air traffic in a normal day or one tweet spreading. A theme was that humans had to create narratives around the data (per Jack Dorsey), and to follow the trail from the data point to the actual real-world event (Jer Thorpe). What makes a culture collectively change its view of data? - one participant asks. What is the context of the data? – several query.

Cause for pause things - And that takes us to an underlying issue with the show.. which is that there is this unspoken progressive notion that we are getting better – that a Ivy League youngster who studied statistics and grew up with the Web for pablum, soda, and bread can do better than the dimwits that went before. It could be true. But correlation is not causation.To phrase a coin. -Jack Vaughan