Comment by richhickey
10 years ago
Data like that sentence? Or all of the other sentences in this chat? I find 'data' hard to consider a bad idea in and of itself, i.e. if data == information, records of things known/uttered at a point in time. Could you talk more about data being a bad idea?
What is "data" without an interpreter (and when we send "data" somewhere, how can we send it so its meaning is preserved?)
Data without an interpreter is certainly subject to (multiple) interpretation :) For instance, the implications of your sentence weren't clear to me, in spite of it being in English (evidently, not indicated otherwise). Some metadata indicated to me that you said it (should I trust that?), and when. But these seem to be questions of quality of representation/conveyance/provenance (agreed, important) rather than critiques of data as an idea. Yes, there is a notion of sufficiency ('42' isn't data).
Data is an old and fundamental idea. Machine interpretation of un- or under-structured data is fueling a ton of utility for society. None of the inputs to our sensory systems are accompanied by explanations of their meaning. Data - something given, seems the raw material of pretty much everything else interesting, and interpreters are secondary, and perhaps essentially, varied.
There are lots of "old and fundamental" ideas that are not good anymore, if they ever were.
The point here is that you were able to find the interpreter of the sentence and ask a question, but the two were still separated. For important negotiations we don't send telegrams, we send ambassadors.
This is what objects are all about, and it continues to be amazing to me that the real necessities and practical necessities are still not at all understood. Bundling an interpreter for messages doesn't prevent the message from being submitted for other possible interpretations, but there simply has to be a process that can extract signal from noise.
This is particularly germane to your last paragraph. Please think especially hard about what you are taking for granted in your last sentence.
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Information in "entropy" sense is objective and meaningless. Meaning only exists within a context. If we think "data" represent information, "interpreters" bring us context and therefore meaning.
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The more meaning you pack into a message, the harder the message is to unpack.
So there's this inherent tradeoff between "easy to process" and "expressive" -- and I imagine deciding which side you want to lean toward depends on the context.
Check this out for a practical example: https://www.practicingruby.com/articles/information-anatomy
(not a Ruby article, but instead about essential structure of messages, loosely inspired by ideas in Gödel, Escher, Bach)
So the idea is to always send the interpreter, along with the data? They should always travel together?
Interesting. But, practically, the interpreter would need to be written in such a way that it works on all target systems. The world isn't set up for that, although it should be.
Hm, I now realize your point about HTML being idiotic. It should be a description, along with instructions for parsing and displaying it (?)
TCP/IP is "written in such a way that it works on all target systems". This partially worked because it was early, partly because it is small and simple, partly because it doesn't try to define structures on the actual messages, but only minimal ones on the "envelopes". And partly because of the "/" which does not force a single theory.
This -- and the Parc PUP "internet" which preceded it and influenced it -- are examples of trying to organize things so that modules can interact universally with minimal assumptions on both sides.
The next step -- of organizing a minimal basis for inter-meanings -- not just internetworking -- was being thought about heavily in the 70s while the communications systems ideas were being worked on, but was quite to the side, and not mature enough to be made part of the apparatus when "Flag Day" happened in 1983.
What is the minimal "stuff" that could be part of the "TCP/IP" apparatus that could allow "meanings" to be sent, not just bits -- and what assumptions need to be made on the receiving end to guarantee the safety of a transmitted meaning?
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Take a look here:
https://tekkie.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/sicp-what-is-meant-b...
Data, and the entirety of human understanding and knowledge derived from recording, measurement and analysis of data, predates computing, so I don't see the relevance of these recent, programming-centric notions in a discussion of its value.
Wouldn't Mr. Kay say that it is education that builds the continuity of the entirety of human understanding? Greek philosophy and astronomy survived in the Muslim world and not in the European, though both possessed plenty of texts, because only the former had an education system that could bootstrap a mind to think in a way capable of understanding and adding to the data. Ultimately, every piece of data is reliant on each generation of humans equipping enough of their children with the mindset capable to use it intelligently.
The value of data is determined by the intelligence of those interpreting it, not those who recorded it.
Of course, this dynamic is sometimes positive. The Babylonians kept excellent astronomical records though apparently making little theoretical advance in understanding them. Greeks with an excellent grasp of geometry put that data to much better use very quickly. But if they had had to wait to gather the data themselves, one can imagine them waiting a long time.
This kind of gets into philosophy, but a metaphor I came up with for thinking about this (another phrase for it is "thought experiment") is:
If I speak something to a rock, what is it to the rock? Is it "signal," or "data"?
Making the concept a little more interesting, what if I resonate the rock with a sound frequency? What is that to the rock? Is that "signal," or "data"?
Up until the Rosetta Stone was found, Egyptian hieroglyphs were indecipherable. Could data be gathered from them, nevertheless? Sure. Researchers could determine what pigments were used, and/or what tools were used to create them, but they couldn't understand the messages. It wasn't "data" up to that point. It was "noise."
I hope I am not giving the impression that I am a postmodernist who is out here saying, "Data is meaningless." That's not what I'm saying. I am saying meaning is not self-evident from signal. The concept of data requires the ability to interpret signal for meaning to be acquired.
Computing has existed for thousands of years. We just have machines do some of it now.
What if "data" is a really great idea?
Your blog looks very interesting. You should share some links of it here on hackernews!
Thanks. I share it wherever I think it will add to the discussion.