Haunted by Data

The reality is that businesses:

(1) aren't sure of the value of their data. Perhaps there is a company willing to buy their data and they might need that money someday. Maybe if they had more historic data, reporting would show a clearer trend in some way that would help drive them in the right direction- if they had the resources to analyze all of it.

(2) may not fully understand the laws and regulations they may be bound to that relate to how long they need to keep data.

I think it's not a bad thing to spend the time to understand your legal obligations, clean up your data, and remove what you'd never need or never realistically be able to sell. But many companies don't have that time.

The Nazis

The used census data from the 1930's innocently collected by govts and collated by IBM subsidiaries. The subsidiaries then passed this on to the Nazis a few years later when the govts were conquered.

Then the Hollerith machines did a query : "select person if parent=Jew or grandparent=Jew"

you didn't thinnk they did it with pencil and paper now did you ?

Thomas J. Watson, chairman of IBM, didn't get his 1937 Order of the German Eagle for nothing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_German_Eagle

I'd love to hear about reactions you got from other attendees at the conference. Was there interest, serious thought, skepticism?

For every russian LGBT person worried due to acquisition of LiveJournal, there are countless in other countries who have benefitted from Social Networks, who have organized & furthered their cause. Also the state apparatus is so powerful that any additional knowledge gained from LiveJournal data is likely meagre.

These slides espouse the same kind of luddite thinking that brought us Drug Wars, where rather than sane policy making we ended up with war on drugs fueled by morality and lack of introspection. One can easily construct similar set of slides showing why "Free Speech" is evil and ought to be regulated like "Radioactivity".

Also the writer has zero training in Pharmacy or BioMedicine and is talking complete non-sense when it comes to Pharma industry. Over last three decades medicine has had significant improvement thanks to innovation in devices, surgeries and adoption of "Evidence based medicine" and no the evidence comes from "Data" collected on large scale and not randomly injecting patient with chemicals. We have made huge progress in curing some types of cancers, converted HIV-AIDS into a manageable chronic condition from a death sentence. For all the visions of doom, and cherry picked examples of poor leaders, World has been a much better place.

The growing fear is that the data-driven approach is inherently a poor fit for life science. In the world of computers, we learn to avoid certain kinds of complexity, because they make our systems impossible to reason about.

But Nature is full of self-modifying, interlocking systems, with interdependent variables you can't isolate. In these vast data spaces, directed iterative search performs better than any amount of data mining.

All these statements are complete bullshit and presented with zero evidence. This article is so spectacularly bad that I am amazed. The author majored in Russian and Studio Art, and other than some programming (seemingly very proficient) has no knowledge or background in Medicine, Healthcare or Bio-Medical Sciences.