Comment by godelski

I'm absolutely fascinated by your answer!

Can you tell me more about the pipeline? Are you really starting from scratch by programming? You don't do any sketching first? I'm really having a hard time imagining doing anything reasonably complicated with this method. I'll admit that there are some advantages like guaranteeing bounds but there's so much that seems actually harder to do that way.

  > They record them digitally

Like I said, it is contextually dependent. If you're recording with digital equipment to a computer, then yeah, it's just easier to record that way and dump into a plot. But if you don't have that then no. And again, even recording by hand it is still dependent.

But some data is naturally image data (pictures?). Some data is naturally in other modalities (chemical reactions? Smell? Texture? Taste?). Yes, with digital recording equipment you can argue that this is all text but at that point I'd argue you're being facetious as everything is text by that definition.

  > You may obtain them from looking at images but the hard truth is numerical, digital, textual.
 

Here I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding and are likely limiting yourself based on your experience.

First off, not every measuring device is digital. So just that alone makes it down right false. And pretending all measurements are digital is just deceptive or naive.

Second, and I cannot stress this enough: *every single measurement is a proxy* to the thing you intend to measure.

You can't even measure a damn meter directly. You can measure distance through reference length that is an approximation of a standard distance (aka a ruler). You can measure distance through reference to an approximation of time and through the use of some known velocity, such as the speed of light through a given medium (approximating time, approximating c in the medium, approximating the medium). And so on.

What you cannot do is measure a meter directly.

And most of the things we're trying to measure, model, and approximate in modern science are far more abstract than a standard unit!

The idea that the ground truth is textual is ridiculous. That would only be true on the condition that the universe itself is running on a digital computer. Despite the universe being able to do computation, I see little reason to believe it is digital.