From “The Scratching Post”: Not enough data

By Ken Marks

[Opening from the original on The Scratching Post, yesterday, May 25, 2022, published here by permission of the author.]

I like data, gobs and gobs of data. I like gigabytes, terabytes, petabytes, and whatever comes next. I'm particularly fond of data about groups — their preferences, predilections, penchants, partialities, and politics. Yes, I'm aware of the tyrants and lowlifes who use data destructively to abuse people and amass power. This is a drawback that powerful things — like corporations, nuclear power plants, the wired world, gene editing, artificial intelligence — have in common. We need them, but they can be dangerous. The answer is regulation, not rejection.
    I like to imagine the topology of data, the hills and valleys of data we have about every subject that we've deemed fit to study. There are some subjects — say, the global distribution of Formosan subterranean termites — that can boast a ton of data. Conversely, there are subjects, many that are keenly important, with a dearth of data. One such subject is comparative cultural values. We need a set of metrics that tells us how close (or far apart) the values of any two cultures are. If we had a way to reliably measure cultural distance, we'd have a tool that could show where cultural collisions might occur. Forearmed, we could use the science of mediation to find the roots of our value differences and work at reconciling them....
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[Read the whole thing on The Scratching Post.]

Copyright © 2022 by Ken Marks Ken Marks was a contributing editor with Paul Clark & Tom Lowe when “Moristotle” became “Moristotle & Co.” A brilliant photographer, witty conversationalist, and elegant writer, Ken contributed photographs, essays, and commentaries from mid-2008 through 2012. Late in 2013, Ken birthed the blog The Scratching Post. He also posts albums of his photos on Flickr.