empathy + data
I took in a session with @HugeInc’s planning director Martin Harrison titled, The Empathy Gap: Why Stalin Nailed Big Data. It was a great discussion that attempted to highlight a failing of Big Data.
“One death is a tragedy; one million is just statistics,” — Joseph Stalin(maybe)
Presented early in the talk, this quote really highlighted the key point. As humans large numbers lose their personal relevance and meaning with individuals. We can imagine and relate to one, two, even ten people dying, but when confronted with millions it just doesn't register the same way.
He went on to show data(study unkown, will try and find it) that essentially showed when asked what the sentence for a criminal who ruined the lives of 3 people should be and the same question for one who ruined the live of 30. Consistently the criminal with three victims received the higher sentence. Only when presented with a photo of one of the 30 victims did the sentence gap close but not completely. This tells us that humanity and data need to co-exist for it to have relevance.
Key takeaway — Big data is dehumanizing
He brought this around to real world examples of how we remove humanity from big data when we're creating digital products for clients. Most of us look at say conversion data and we focus on the .00001% that convert and try and get them to convert more and more often and completely ignore the 99.99999999% that do not convert. When you think about it, it really is silly to ignore that many users. If we stop and remember that these users are people, then we can ask what stopped them?
Essentially large data sets remove the humanity and we forget who we’re building experiences for, focusing only on the organization's needs(converters) vs the users needs will keep us converting the very very few.
Key takeaway — We all build things. Who’s it for, us or them?
