{"id":53838,"date":"2020-06-23T17:11:26","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T22:11:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53838"},"modified":"2020-06-23T17:11:32","modified_gmt":"2020-06-23T22:11:32","slug":"is-data-our-new-false-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=53838","title":{"rendered":"Is Data Our New False Religion?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"http:\/\/charleshughsmith.blogspot.com\/2020\/06\/is-data-our-new-false-religion.html\">Is Data Our New False Religion?<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>In the false religion of data, heresy is asking for data that is not being collected because it might reveal unpalatably unprofitable realities.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Here&#8217;s how every modern con starts:\u00a0<em>let&#8217;s look at the data.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0Every modern con starts with an earnest appeal to\u00a0<em>look at the data<\/em>\u00a0because the con artist has assembled the data to grease the slides of the con.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>We have been indoctrinated into a new and false religion, the\u00a0<em>faith of data.<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0We&#8217;ve been relentlessly indoctrinated with the quasi-religious belief that &#8220;data doesn&#8217;t lie,&#8221; when the reality is that\u00a0<em>data consistently misleads us because that is the intent<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Nobody in the\u00a0<em>False Religion of Data<\/em>\u00a0ever looks at what\u00a0<em>we don&#8217;t measure<\/em>\u00a0because that would uncover disruptive truths.<\/strong>\u00a0My latest book\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B082VLQBQ3\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B082VLQBQ3&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=charleshughsm-20&amp;linkId=87deea89ddfe8dbf52738aebbf7f7ef4\" target=\"_blank\">Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World<\/a>\u00a0looks at everything consequential that we don&#8217;t measure, and since we don&#8217;t measure it, we assume\u00a0<em>it doesn&#8217;t exist.<\/em>\u00a0That&#8217;s the end-game of the\u00a0<em>False Religion of Data<\/em>:\u00a0<strong>what&#8217;s actually important isn&#8217;t measured and therefore it doesn&#8217;t exist, while what is measured is artfully packaged to support a narrative that enriches those behind the screen of &#8220;objective data-based science.&#8221;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The data-based con can be constructed in any number of ways.<\/strong>\u00a0A few data points can be cleverly extrapolated to &#8220;prove&#8221; some self-serving claim, a bit of data can be conjured into a model that just so happens to support the most profitable policy option, inconvenient data points can be covertly deleted via &#8220;filtering out the outliers,&#8221; statistical trickery can be invoked (with a wave of this magic wand&#8230;) to declare semi-random data &#8220;statistically significant,&#8221; and so on, in an almost endless stream of tricks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Is Data Our New False Religion? In the false religion of data, heresy is asking for data that is not being collected because it might reveal unpalatably unprofitable realities. Here&#8217;s how every modern con starts:\u00a0let&#8217;s look at the data.\u00a0Every modern con starts with an earnest appeal to\u00a0look at the data\u00a0because the con artist has assembled [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[24078,190,29931,426,29932,587],"class_list":["post-53838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-charles-hugh-smith-2","tag-data","tag-false-religion","tag-inflation","tag-measurement","tag-of-two-minds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=53838"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53838\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53840,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53838\/revisions\/53840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}