Big Data, Big Dupe

Mr. Few’s short but poignant slaughter of Big Data as a panacea is on point. Organizations claim they need analytics and more data and better data, yet many of them lack interesting questions and/or the people who have the skills to make sense of the data. I have read and shared many the article about the promise of “Big Data” however, I’ve also maintained that the term itself means nothing. Size is relative and scaling matters to the processing power needed, but it doesn’t as Mr Few correctly asserts alleviate the ills that plague data review and analysis since the days that it was first collected in the form of clay tablets or knotted ropes. It doesn’t dissolve axioms like, “Good Data In, Good Data Out” and it does not mean that models became immutable laws of the universe. Models are (by definition) not reality, they are a means of inquiry and measurement. Reality can deviate widely from normal in the sense of standard deviations and those outliers can change the course of history. It’s a good reminder that the only way we advance our knowledge as a collective society is to be rigorous in our skepticism as we search for shared truths.