Data Is Not The Answer
Theory Is The Answer
Why has the digital industry failed to deliver to the understanding of human nature, behaviour or ethics?
Data means “given”, data gives us “things” and we receive these “things” passively, as what they seem to be.
Data narrows down what a person is to fit the notion of a “user”: A constrained interpretation, one that takes on what data offers alone, flattening intentionality, behaviour and choice to mere sequences of events.
Data thingifies a subject to the qualities of a lifeless object, a thing that can be uncovered, unmysteriously, one whose behaviour follows simple rules of causation, attributing the reasons and causes behind choices to previous structures and states of that which the user sees, in absence of affects, emotions and feelings.
We passively accept this narrowed view of what an individual is, a view that leads the industry to believe that humans are predictable and follow known trajectories.
Such causal interpretation is then taken as certain, absolute in nature; a source of rock solid truths that signal choices over which products are built, in continuity.
If you challenge this, if you question these truths, then you become active.
When you take an active role from the early beginning, you take on uncertainty and ambiguity, on empty spaces, even chaos. This is not a comfortable space to be but it is the very place from the greatest achievements originate.
Why is it thought that we can attain certainty?
Why do we have to know everything?
What I find paradoxical is that while seeking certainty and truth, we are moved by an emotion, a desire to know.
Funnily, we decide to ignore how people feel because we feel uneasy in disorder. Our very feeling motivates us to ignore individual’s feelings.
Not knowing, not being able to grasp and catalogue how people feel online results in a very dissatisfactory miss-comfort, as if one is to sit on a table in disarray, opening your messy email, everything out of control, in chaos. We desire order.
We tend to find doubt and untidiness an uncomfortable state of mind. Even disorder we see as something that may be and can be meticulously arranged.
Looking at data offers a satisfying concrete picture, looking outside data delivers incompleteness. And this is not easy to live or accept, we feel the desire to improve this and data serves this desire.
Instead of building on what is given, instead of holding, grabbing and taking bricks of certainty in absoluteness, what we have to do is to take what data gives us as circumstantial, temporary and insufficient views that we may put at our service, that serve our knowledge and creative capacity.
Putting data in line as opposed to putting ourselves in line to data, means being driven by theories not by data. First comes the theory, then the facts, said Hume. Else there are no theories but facts.
Once we realise that theories can not be certain, that they need to embrace ambiguity and chaos, nothing helps but self-criticism.
Being critic to our thinking, exposing it, being open to continuously challenge these our theories is the only thing by which we can improve them, the way by which we can make our theories closer to truths.
Criticising our very theories is rather difficult. How can one tickle oneself?
