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- The belief that The Truth is easily accessible if we all agree to some basic procedures came to be understood as a universal truth of humankind — but really what happened is that a specific strand of European civilization became globalized.
- Thirty years ago, writing a good research paper meant assembling a cohesive argument from the available facts. Today, it means assembling the facts from a substantially larger pool to fit the desired narrative. It isn’t just indifferent students who do this, of course. Anyone who works with data knows the temptation, or sometimes the necessity, of squeezing every bit of good news out of an Excel spreadsheet, web traffic report, or regression analysis.
- Being limited to a smaller set of facts used to also require something else: trust in the institutions and experts that credentialed the facts. This trust rested on the belief that they were faithful stewards on behalf of the public, carrying out those social verification procedures so that you did not need to.
If you refused to trust the authority and judgment of the New Yorker, the New England Journal of Medicine, or Harvard University Press, then you weren’t going to be able to write your paper. And whatever ideas or thinkers did not meet their editorial judgments or fact-checking standards would simply never appear in your field of view. There’s a reason why anti-institutional conspiratorializing — rejecting the government, the media, The Man — was a kind of vague vibes-based paranoia. You could reject those authorities, but the tradeoff was that this cast your arguments adrift on the vast sea of feeling, intuition, personal experience, and hearsay.
- What is data good for? It isn’t just an arms race of facts — “let me just check one more review.” The fact gives you a knowledge-thing that you can take to the bank. But it can’t go any further than that. If you have enough facts, you can try to build and test a theory to explain and understand the world, and hopefully also make some useful predictions. But if you have a metric ton of facts, and a computer powerful enough to sort through them, you can skip explaining the world with theories and go straight to predictions. Statistical techniques can find patterns and make predictions right off the data — no need for humans to come up with hypotheses to test or theories to understand. If facts unlock the secrets of nature, data unlocks the future.
- But this power — to explore not just reality as it is, but all the realities that might be — has brought about a new danger. If the temptation of the age of facts was to believe that the only things one could know were those that procedural reason or science validated, the temptation of the age of data is to believe that any coherent narrative path that can be charted through the data has a claim to truth, that alternative facts permit alternate realities.