Don’t worry honey, Big Data will look out for you
by digby
Over the week-end the Washington Post featured an excellent article by Nancy Scola, a journalist and former staffer on the House government oversight committee, about the Obama administration and its relationship to “Big Data” — and not just in the national security realm. I hadn’t thought about it quite this way before an it strikes me a relevant to the discussion we are having. I’ve always had a sense that Obama had a weakness for the whiz kids and suffered from the “best and brightest” syndrome and this is one specific way in which it manifested:
In the political world, the promise of data — whether it’s Nate Silver’s spot-on election predictions or President Obama’s clearinghouse of government information, Data.gov — is that we no longer have to take so much on faith. “What do the data show?” is the new “What do you think?,” the new “Is this a good idea?”
But belief in the clarifying power of data is its own kind of faith, and it is one Obama has embraced, even before winning the presidency. And now, with the revelation that the National Security Agency is processing huge caches of telephone records and Internet data, the American public is being asked to take on faith how data — and how much data — is being gathered and used in Washington.
The “big data” presidency transcends intelligence-gathering and surveillance, encompassing the White House’s approach on matters from health care to reelection. A big-data fact sheet the White House put out in March 2012 — upon the launch of its $200 million Big Data Research and Development Initiative — listed more than 85 examples of such efforts across a number of agencies. They include the CyberInfrastructure for Billions of Electronic Records (CI-BER), led in part by the National Archives and the National Science Foundation, and NASA’s Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), which the fact sheet described as a “collaborative, international effort to share and integrate Earth observation data.” And the Defense Department is putting about $250 million a year into the research and development of such projects — “a big bet on big data,” as the White House called it.
Data is just data. It has no intrinsic moral character one way or the other. But I do get the feeling from a fair number of wonkish leaders in all aspects of public life that it has taken on a sort of well … religious significance. It is beyond any questions, the ultimate arbiter of what is real and what is true. Except, it’s just data … subject to interpretation by those fatally flawed machines known as human beings.
As this article points out, the real question is what to do with it. She quotes Eisenhower’s military industrial complex speech from 1961:
“In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system, ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”
More than 50 years later, the task of the modern statesman and stateswoman is to engage the public in the work of integrating the old and the new.
But when the statesmen in charge are in awe of the scientific-technological elite it’s perfectly fair to wonder if they agree with that. It seems to me there’s a blanket belief among our elites that Big Data is an unalloyed good and the degree to which average people must submit to it is of secondary interest at best. Why wouldn’t we?
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