Data vs Information

[xanify]

So because I am a nerd, today on my walk home I was ruminating about the difference between data and information, and recommendations.

Probably easiest to illustrate with an example. Let's take the problem of, say, restaurants. You want to go to one. How do you pick?

1. Data is "here is a list of restaurants, and their locations, and their menus."

Comments

[xanify]

NERD FISTBUMPS

Yeah, I do think the understanding/interpretation part is something that's often lacking in business-y domains, because a lot of What Gets Believed is who can spin a compelling story around it (which is why a ranked list of stores by sales volume alone is compellingly misleading). Or rather, it's something they know at a gut-feel level but tend to be unable to articulate. "Trust" is another fun thing when it comes to information, and tends to be more along the lines of, I trust this person because they've been around for ages and their information has been good in the past so I will believe the information they're giving me now. Which is far less repeatable than p-values.

(kind of relatedly, I feel like that's why sometimes innovation~ in business sounds Very Obvious when it's laid out in a Forbes article or something, because it jives with people's gut feel of the world. Kinda like how truly innovative ideas sound incredibly obvious once it's laid out for you, or how world-changing inventions make people think "why didn't we do this before?")

So I'd even go as far to view interpretation as being on the level of recommendations -- because scientists might be hesitant to get into specific recommendations, but it's still a view that is formed based on multiple pieces of information which in turn is based on a lot of data. Even if it's more "based on [all of this stuff] we think [some approach] is a good idea" rather than "do this thing."

[kawuli]

Yes, this makes sense. Scientists like to pretend to be objective, but it's a similar thing to what business types would call recommendations.

And yes to the best innovations seeming obvious after the fact. There's....some kind of something about how people pretend that they were also somehow easy to come up with? Which I think plays into the ongoing stream of "Uber for Popsicles" and whatever else people are doing these days. But I'm not sure how to articulate the chain of logic.

[xanify]

Yeah, I think I know what you mean. It's a kind of conceit where we tell ourselves that some Great Innovation was so obvious that anyone could've thought of it (which isn't often true), and also so general that it can be applied to anything else (which isn't often true either).

Humans are odd.

[kawuli]

Humans are odd.

+1