Comment by richhickey
10 years ago
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?