The more data we acquires, the less we know (A folly to assume to know too much) ALTES Facts & Quotes Portal March 22, 2014 / New York City Excerpts from The Folly of Thinking We Known by Pico Iyer, op-ed contributor, The New York Times Op-Ed, March 20, 2014. Pico Iyer is the author, most recently, of “The Man Within My Head” and a distinguished presidential fellow at Chapman University. • Data doubling every two years. Humanity now produces as much data in two days as it did in all of history till the year 2003 — and the amount of data is doubling every two years. In the time you take to read this piece, the human race will generate as much data as currently exists in the Library of Congress. • Nature to overestimate. The Nobel Prize-winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman has noted, after decades of research, that it’s our nature to overestimate how much we understand the world and to underestimate the role of chance. And it’s our folly to assume we know very much at all. • The less we know. Whatever the field of our expertise, most of us realize that the more data we acquire, the less, very often, we know. The universe is not a fixed sum, in which the amount you know subtracts from the amount you don’t. • Limits of knowledge. And it can often seem as if nature — or something beyond our reckoning at least — intrudes every time we’re tempted to get above ourselves. Whenever we begin to assume we can command or comprehend quite a bit, some Icarian calamity pushes our face, tragically, in the limits of our knowledge. It’s been humbling, as well as horrifying, to see the entire globe, in an age of unprecedented data accumulation, up in the air, more or less, but poignantly aware that, whatever we do learn, a grief beyond understanding is likely to be a part of it.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 11:12:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015