11 ms·
>This means I oftentimes find myself looking at the raw numbers of, say, gun deaths or immigration numbers, etc. Data is meaningless without context and contex
by minikites 7y ago
>This means I oftentimes find myself looking at the raw numbers of, say, gun deaths or immigration numbers, etc.
Data is meaningless without context and context is inevitably political and subject to bias.
- mcantelon 7y agoGood rhetoric to have on speed dial when encountering data that contradicts one's beliefs.
- minikites 7y agoOkay, explain to me how data in isolation communicates meaning.
- mcantelon 7y agoThe word "meaningless" is defined as "lacking any significance". The claim that data lacks any significance until someone extracts meaning from it seems most useful, apart from philosophical discussions, as a rhetorical attempt to make data secondary to interpretation and ergo something that can be waved away by belief systems.
- afiori 7y agoBut sometimes it is true, for example in the sense that data alone does not tell much about what is being measured and its significance. For example high levels of cholesterol are negatively correlated to heart infarction, mostly because the population at highest risk is under medication and has so extremely low cholesterol. In this case the data itself is meaningless as it does not contain its own significance. This does not mean that we can freely discard data we don't like, it is important and useful, just not necessarily intrinsically meaningful. A good analysis is made so that it is obvious to justify this layer of interpretation.
- ralusek 7y agoContext is data. All you're saying is that data is better when there is additional relevant data. Yes...
- minikites 7y agoContext is often not data, e.g. knowledge of past events, which can be subject to incomplete information or bias (i.e. history is written by the victorious).