I enjoyed the preparatory work of arranging data into a presentable form. The surprise was when I was then put in a position to present this to a critical audience. I accidentally experience the ability to handle surprising questions. I was addicted. The addiction was to the conversation. The conversation happened to involve the language of data, a vast collection of individual datum.
I earlier wrote an idea that there can even be compensation for people to record their opinions so that those may be available for analysis for government, hopefully for a better one than we have now. This would provide the discourse analysts a richer repository to study to find context and settings for other discourses. It would also make their job much more difficult. Context and setting are easier to construct when you have very little information about either.
In this increasingly globalized world, we confront the question of how well groups may govern themselves optimally not only to survive within their local context but also keep up with the standards of the global norms. The goal is for self government but that government should thrive at a comparable level to the global norm. What is that measurement that will determine a group’s success at self-governing?
Time, as we experience it, has different components sharing a common unit (such as seconds). There is the scientific time that is analytic in a way that makes possible mechanistic models that are very successful at modeling the physical world. There is the historic time that allows for growing intelligence made possible by the additional evidence that comes inevitably from the passage of time. For intelligence to act upon the physical (mechanistic) world to exercise a free will, there is a component of time required for persuasion through some process that allows for selecting the opportunities presented by the otherwise indifferent physical world.
My hypothesis is that men do have a tendency to prefer male voices for topics of high interest or importance, and that tendency is a consequence of the opportunity for a fruitful counterargument when we disagree. I follow more male voices than female voices, because there are many more people I disagree with than I agree with. I will listen to both sexes if I agree with them, but I will only follow men if there is a potential that I will disagree with them. It is only with other men that I can have any chance of gaining anything through argument.
We could restore debates by an analog to a fight to the death. The defeated in the debate would have to kill his presence in social media and then build a new presence with a new identity. Lacking such finality in a debate allows a person to return to the established fortress of his channel with its established subscriber base, and within weeks resume content as if the debate never occurred.
A data-driven economy is not a free economy. While there remains promise that algorithms acting on vast amounts of rapidly arriving data can produce a better economy, I am suspicious that such an economy will eventually languish because it robs the human actors of their ability to negotiate. The vitality of a free economy derives from individual freedom to negotiate terms of engagement. Eventually, A data-driven economy may prove to be superior but it will succeed only by suppressing natural human negotiation. Human actors negotiating in a data-driven economy must negotiate with machines. Applying approaches that work for other humans to machines instead is criminalized as cybercrime. Human negotiation involves coming to terms with weaknesses as well as strengths. Exploiting weaknesses of machines is a crime.
When we identify a population with a label of low incomes we imply that their lives would be better if they had higher incomes. This meaning is similar to the above syllogistic fallacy of the illicit major. While there is no doubt that many poor people would desire higher incomes, there are many who choose lower incomes because of some other benefit they get from the jobs. The jobs may be less demanding, or may involve the kind of work they find more enjoyable.
Data should meet tests against fallacies that apply to data like errors in grammar, logic, or reasoning are fallacies in arguments. The above example of a medical health record of a birth with same-sex parents and the mother identifying as a male is analogous to a grammatical error even though the data itself meets the business rules for the form. We should be able to object to this data as valid to use for some purposes such as determining eligibility medical necessity for health services just like we would reject a grammatically incorrect sentence in an formal argument.
Democracy also can not afford to be distracted by spark data (stray voltage) for the same reason. The urgent issues need solutions that require hard and painful choices. Unfortunately, the modern practice of democracy demands obedience to daily public opinion polls that are easily manipulated by stray voltage or spark data. Instead of governing by the people, modern democracy wastes time on arguments over sparks.
Hypothesis Discovery 