“Big Data” or whatever synonyms they wish to call it is only as good as those who design the algorithms to analyze it. Too often, we as a society, put too much faith in quantification and little in qualification. We say “quality” is subjective — so it’s bias. Quantity however is math — and we can’t dispute math. We fail to remember the “garbage in … out garbage out” adage. It held true thirty years ago when I started programming and it holds true now. Only the most important input is the algorithm.

Yes we have to look at people before we look at the data. But before we can do that, we need to look at whose doing the looking — whose designing the algorithm to determine what’s important and what’s not.

Imagine if instead of a technologist designing the algorithm … we had a sociologist do it. What would the data look like then? Just a thought.