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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

There's a troubling tone behind this article.

It's a prophecy that demands to be fulfilled.

Starting with the premise "Data is useful", it proceeds to pick at all the ways we've failed to make it useful... and we're damned well going to make it useful if it kills us!

Maybe, just maybe (for those that dabble in the sceptical, explanatory game we call science) it might be that "bare data" has little use within certain contexts... say those that by definition are on the cutting edge of knowledge and reality, best steered by imaginative vision of leading experts.

Data driven market cybernetics may be very useful in some industries, such as ones with physical logistics, complex supply chains, rapidly shifting supply sources and demand sinks. But the primacy of "data uber alles" should not be one-size-fits-all.

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One man's troubling tone is another man's dystopic reality.

I read a comment on here months ago about someone who enabled a hotel chain to process the data coming from the motion activated lights in every hotel. The chain was able to track workers with this data and cracked down on people taking too long of breaks.

And now a personal anecdote. The business I used to work at had an ID badge door you had to use to enter the smoking area. I was told by someone I trusted that when layoffs came, a member of management asked for a list of the people that used that door. The people on that list were prioritized for termination.

"Universities are literally awash in data. From administrative data offering information about students, faculty and staff, to research data on professors’ scholarly activities and even telemetric signals"

Why are professors' telemetric signals even being discussed? Are publicly listed office hours not enough? My dogs got chipped without their consent. Do professors deserve more dignity than my dogs?

This is the problem. The data could be used for good: to improve the education being provided to the students, and to improve conditions for those working for the university, but history tells that most of the time it will end up being used against/at the expense of those same people and that there will be a much stronger profit incentive to do the wrong thing rather than the right one.

This is generalizable. "____ is useful" is rarely (ever?) true by itself. Gasoline? Solar Panel? Turbine? Wings? Extra Food? Fertilizer?

There's a cost/benefit curve here.

Having data can undeniably be useful. The question is, how much ROI does the insights in the data provide, relative to the cost to build the organizational infrastructure capable of extracting these insights?

And there's a bootstrapping problem, because often it's hard to calculate the potential ROI without actually going through the work of building the infrastructure to process the data.

Indeed, absolutely true. And furthermore, sometimes the value of data, and of possible other sources, doesn't emerge until you start analysis and then deductively see new collection opportunities. It's a to-and-fro process.

> how much ROI does the insights in the data provide, relative to the cost to build the organizational infrastructure

Having seen the workings of academia for a long time now I'd argue very little.

But I think the problem is more subtle. A Heisenbergian problem. When data collection involves people you have a triple problem of intrusion, distraction, and ossification. the act of trying to create a "data driven culture" in some contexts simply kills what's there. The cost of this, in addition to the bootstrapping costs of sensors and analytics are paralysing.

Academia, by its very nature, if properly functioning, demands to be dynamic. If it's good, it will not stand still long enough for you to look at it. And if you measure it "too hard" it will evaporate as all the good people who resent ossification leave.

The old “solution looking for a problem” problem.

I think it's simpler: imagine you're the NSA and decide to transcribe every phone call ever made to text: you'll spend gazillion in storage, connectivity and processing for the capture, and spend a gazillion squared on post-capture text analysis to find "something", like "who is communist in Atlanta", and not even be able to make it find the communists pre-emptively, before it's too late and they already donated $3 to a local chapter.

There can be too much data. There are questions you cannot answer even by collecting all data, unless you have no time or food cost constraints but the value of your answer will decrease with the time distance from the moment the question was asked. In a million year you might know for sure who was communist in Atlanta during the 2000s, year by year, block by block, but you may care less by then.

I expect Facebook can easily identify most communists are in Atlanta.

Well that’s easy, you just look up who lives in L5P and Decatur.

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