This below is a long quote from the article. I'll summarize the quote as ... our belief in data is making us less smart:
You also write that “[t]he era of the fact is coming to an end: the place once held by ‘facts’ is being taken over by ‘data.’” How so?
For years, I have taught a class at Harvard Law School called the history of evidence. In the course of teaching that class, I developed a theory with my students of the transformation of the elemental unit of knowledge across the history of the West, from “mystery” to “the fact” to “numbers” to “data.” “Mystery” is what God knows but humans can’t know. And for a lot of human history, much of how things happen in the natural world was mysterious to us (like where does life come from? What happens when we die?), leaving us with great humility and incredible vulnerability. Many of these things are still mysteries, but a lot of things have been revealed, like how disease is transmitted. The emergence of what historians call “the cult of the fact” is associated with the beginnings of trial by jury, which starts in the 13th century when ordinary people are charged with hearing evidence given by two sides in a dispute and determining the verdict, which means the truth is based on the presentation of facts, or observed acts.
The “fact” transformed all kinds of realms of knowledge: the scientific revolution depends on the idea of the fact, journalism comes to depend on the idea of the fact, and histories tend to understand themselves as compilations and interpretations of facts. The “number” begins to vie alongside the fact in the 18th and 19th centuries with the development of the social sciences. All kinds of things can be quantified, and by counting things you get a whole new way of knowing. And in the 19th and 20th centuries, you start to see the emergence of the preference for the elemental unit of knowledge being “data”—by which, in this context, I mean quantification that requires a machine to do it. Data becomes preferable to facts because facts require the human acts of observation, deduction, reasoning, and conclusion. Data doesn’t require any of those things. It doesn’t require humans. It just requires the accumulation and analysis of numbers. And the objective of the cult of data is not truth, the objective of the cult of the fact, but prediction, because the work is all about pattern detection. If you reorganize all of humanity around prediction, and yet people can’t actually undertake those predictions—those predictions are all offered by machines—we have returned, in a sense, to the age of mystery, because in an age of data, only computers can really know things. So we are as vulnerable as we were in a prescientific, pre-Enlightenment world. It’s a really weird kind of reversal.
You also write that “[t]he era of the fact is coming to an end: the place once held by ‘facts’ is being taken over by ‘data.’” How so?
For years, I have taught a class at Harvard Law School called the history of evidence. In the course of teaching that class, I developed a theory with my students of the transformation of the elemental unit of knowledge across the history of the West, from “mystery” to “the fact” to “numbers” to “data.” “Mystery” is what God knows but humans can’t know. And for a lot of human history, much of how things happen in the natural world was mysterious to us (like where does life come from? What happens when we die?), leaving us with great humility and incredible vulnerability. Many of these things are still mysteries, but a lot of things have been revealed, like how disease is transmitted. The emergence of what historians call “the cult of the fact” is associated with the beginnings of trial by jury, which starts in the 13th century when ordinary people are charged with hearing evidence given by two sides in a dispute and determining the verdict, which means the truth is based on the presentation of facts, or observed acts.
The “fact” transformed all kinds of realms of knowledge: the scientific revolution depends on the idea of the fact, journalism comes to depend on the idea of the fact, and histories tend to understand themselves as compilations and interpretations of facts. The “number” begins to vie alongside the fact in the 18th and 19th centuries with the development of the social sciences. All kinds of things can be quantified, and by counting things you get a whole new way of knowing. And in the 19th and 20th centuries, you start to see the emergence of the preference for the elemental unit of knowledge being “data”—by which, in this context, I mean quantification that requires a machine to do it. Data becomes preferable to facts because facts require the human acts of observation, deduction, reasoning, and conclusion. Data doesn’t require any of those things. It doesn’t require humans. It just requires the accumulation and analysis of numbers. And the objective of the cult of data is not truth, the objective of the cult of the fact, but prediction, because the work is all about pattern detection. If you reorganize all of humanity around prediction, and yet people can’t actually undertake those predictions—those predictions are all offered by machines—we have returned, in a sense, to the age of mystery, because in an age of data, only computers can really know things. So we are as vulnerable as we were in a prescientific, pre-Enlightenment world. It’s a really weird kind of reversal.