Data, Strategy, Culture & Power: Win with Data-Centric AI by making human nature work for you by Benton Morgan & Radziwill Nicole

Author:Benton, Morgan & Radziwill, Nicole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lapis Lucera
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

IS SOME DATA BETTER THAN NO DATA?

I was particularly surprised to see Scientific American blaming a glut of UFO reports on “bad data” so prominently, right in the title of its article. NASA’s own UAP team, in its FAQ, firmly placed the blame on limited data, though, not bad data: “Most UAP sightings result in very limited data, making it difficult to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of UAP.” After all, most of the observations the Director of National Intelligence receives are verbal descriptions of a sighting, metadata about the sighting (like time, place, and direction of view), and sometimes photos or videos from a mobile phone.

Having a little bit of data is not the same problem, and often not as significant a problem, as having bad data in any volume. We can use small samples of data to support inferences about the physical phenomena we’re observing, and as long as the data is reasonably good, our findings may be realistic. We may not be confident about our conclusions, but conclusions can be drawn. In contrast, when data is bad, insights made using that data could only be valid by chance.

In the case of the mysterious flying objects, more and better data are needed. On May 31, 2023, NASA’s UAP panel provided an update to reinforce this message. Chair David Spergel, President of the Simons Foundation, explained their rather ordinary initial findings: “Today’s existing data and eyewitness reports are insufficient to yield conclusive evidence about the nature and origin of every UAP event, he said, primarily because of a lack of quality control and poor data curation.” Simply put, NASA has no way of knowing whether the people and instruments generating the data are trustworthy, and the data they receive can’t be expected to come from collections that are systematically organized and maintained.

The Scientific American article also calls out the critical need for making sure people interpreting data use the same terminology to understand that data. In the case of the UAPs, determining what is (and is not) anomalous requires knowing what anomalous even means: “Gaining any new clarity about surging reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, will take time, better data gathering and diagnostic tools and, perhaps most importantly, a hale and hearty dose of nit-picking scientific scrutiny. It may also require a better, sharper definition of what ‘anomalous’ even means in the context of recent sightings.”

While you’ll hear people say “some data is better than no data,” in reality, a limited amount of data may either prove useless or misleading. Think about the years of photographs of the Loch Ness Monster, or the grainy images and videos of Bigfoot that inspired curiosity, wonder, and conspiracy theories. Has limited data been useful in these contexts? It hasn’t been useful in supporting or denying the existence of the creatures, but it has been useful to catalyze fear and inspiration. Only time will reveal whether the phenomena are real or imagined. It takes reflection, scrutiny, multiple observers and multiple observations to convert data to the information and insights people broadly trust.

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