Why Data Is Never Raw
Nick Barrowman,
The New Atlantis,
Jan 17, 2019
There's so much emphasis on things like evidence-based decision-making, or data-driven learning, as though the proponents had never read Kuhn, Lakatos and Laudan. It bears repeating, especially in these days of big data, that "data is never simply given, nor should it be accepted on faith. How data are construed, recorded, and collected is the result of human decisions — decisions about what exactly to measure, when and where to do so, and by what methods." Theory informs data in two key ways: first, the terms we use to describe the world themselves suggest that the world is one way, and not another; and second, what we already believe about the world informs what we believe we see or perceive in the world.
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