YOU KNOW NOTHING! LIVING IN AN ERA OF NOISE
Never in human history have we had access to so much reliable data. So why do we keep getting things so wrong? We live in an era of data overload, we have never had access to so much so fast. How do we make sense of it all? I can't see the facts for all the data ...
NASA, 1986:
A keen bongo player sits alongside a veteran of the Korean War to face the world’s press. Why?
Richard was a mean bongo player, but he was also a Nobel award-winning physicist. Meanwhile, Neil earned his student pilot's license at sixteen years old and flew for the navy during the Korean war, but he was also the first man on the Moon. So what were they doing facing the press?
A fact-finding mission
Richard Feynman and Neil Armstrong were asked to join the Rogers Commission to investigate the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The question? Just what went wrong? What connects these two men is the unerring pursuit of fact.
Despite the politics of NASA, ultimately the facts came out. After close examination of all the data it was recognized that a design fault had caused two small rubber sealant rings to burn through. 73 seconds after liftoff the space shuttle was engulfed in flames, as a result the rocket broke up and, tragically, seven astronauts lost their lives.
The facts were, as they say, 'hidden in plain sight'. Sometimes seeing through all the big data, in this case more than 5000 physical pieces of broken shuttle and rocket, in addition to the noise of politics, to join the dots of data and find the relevant facts takes a moonwalker and a quantum physicist. Sometimes it just takes just takes an insanely curious mind with a passion for education, world health and clarity of thought.
“Stay open to new data and be prepared to keep freshening up your knowledge.”
― Hans Rosling
A fact-based world view — Making sense of it all
It's 2006 and a new kind of conference is gathering admirers.
TED in Monterrey, California was for the best technologists, entertainers and designers. Attendees were paying thousands of dollars to attend. That year an energetic, impish swede, took to the stage. He wasn't an entertainer, but he sure was entertaining as he both illuminated and embarrassed his audience by exposing their ignorance of basic facts.
Hans Rosling, a world health expert and specialist in statistics, made facts sing.
He cleared the room of the noise of data and of the misinterpretation of facts. The audience was changed, to date that presentation has been viewed online over 13 million times.
20 years ago 29% of the world lived in extreme poverty, now it's 9%
Factfullness ― Hans, Ola and Anna Rosling
Does your mindset correspond to my dataset?
Rosling made it his life's mission to battle ignorance with facts. From Monterrey he soon went to the boardrooms of multinational corporations such as CocaCola, Ikea, to global banks and hedge funds. He was demonstrating that so many of us were operating from a distorted world view. He showed that our mindsets didn't correspond with his datasets — that we simply weren't thinking based on facts.
Even our closely held concept of two worlds, one developing and one developed, is completely out of date — not based on current data. Rosling showed that there existed, in fact, four key global income groups. He would question, are we not all developing? Is Singapore, for example, developing or developed? Developing according to the UN, not so said Rosling.
What you think you know, is wrong — upgrade to be better
More people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.
Homo Deus ― Yuval Noah Harari
The facts give us a clearer picture of what is truly happening about us. There is more data available to us and its moving faster about us than ever before. How can we act if we are operating from a basis of facts and data that are fundamentally out of time or context? Trying to understand so much data and information on which to base our facts leaves us asking ourselves what kind of place and time is this?
Ultimately, we must squeeze the smart data from the big data to grasp that which is truly relevant. Only then can we make decisions based on hard facts and act with true purpose.
IMPOSSIBLE TO I'M POSSIBLE — DATA-DRIVEN DECISION MAKING
11 Jun 2019
What is it that transforms the spark of an idea, or an insurmountable challenge, into reality? How do the likes of Elon Musk make the seemingly impossible possible?
Musk wishes to start a real city on Mars by 2050, he's realized almost all his goals. He's an engineer and a visionary with a flair for making dreams a reality, how does he do it? One thing's for sure, whether making his first billion online, or working with rocket science, he has always had an eye for data.
Data drives intelligent decision making. Put another way, we make informed decisions on the basis of hard facts and data.
Realising the impossible
In 218 BC a Carthaginian military leader led a military ambush unprecedented in the history of warfare. What does it take to catch an empire by its tail?
In AD 1962, while addressing a large crowd gathered at a sports stadium in Houston, Texas another leader defines an aim that will necessitate near incomprehensible technical ability to achieve. What is it that transforms the spark of an idea, or an insurmountable challenge, into reality?
JFK, the youthful president didn’t plan to put a man on the moon because he thought it might be possible, it had to be possible.
Visions and plans
The Carthaginian general, Hannibal, chose not to cross the Alps because he thought it was a good idea. Hannibal chose to cross the Alps because he knew it was a good idea.
JFK, the youthful president didn’t plan to put a man on the moon because he thought it might be possible, it had to be possible.
JFK, the youthful president didn’t plan to put a man on the moon because he thought it might be possible, it had to be possible.
Hannibal's enemy, the Roman army, wasn't expecting to wake up to 37 elephants, 15,000 horses and 30,000 soldiers, coming over the mountains and into Italy. The space race against the Soviets had already started, they’d put a man in space, the U.S.A had to put one on the moon.
It’s 1963, we’re back in Texas, this time Dallas, it’s 12:30 pm — the 35th President of the United States is assassinated. A million conspiracy theories are launched. The space race presses on regardless.
And so it came to pass that in 1969 for the first time in human history an American named Neil walked on the moon. Could he possibly have seen the Great Wall of China from outer space? Is it possible that thousands of years before the ancient Egyptians took their inspiration from the lunar body to help layout their burial sites? Or was it aliens…
Data and facts, realizing visions and dreams
Kennedy didn’t put Armstrong on the moon. Not himself, he was no scientist, no pilot or engineer. 400,000 people over ten years did. Aliens didn’t help out with the pyramids, decades of belief in a story assisted by millions of man-hours of labour did. And Hannibal may have crossed the Alps but his elephants, men and horses didn’t make it over without one vital ingredient. Data.
Facts and data, data and facts
Data is the basis of facts, and on facts meaningful decisions made and actions taken.
Data ensured that Apollo 11 could travel 240,000 miles in 76 hours, that a general could make an apparently impossible mission. NASA used data to confirm that the Great Wall cannot be easily seen from space and certainly not from the moon.
Without raw data and facts, advisors would not have advised Kennedy to go ahead with his speech.
Big Data to Smart Data
The sheer amount of data we can now digitally draw upon allows us to make truly powerful decisions. We can now make real that which was previously perceived impossible.
We may have had dreams, such as autonomous driving before but they could never be realised without the ability to harness big data which is now possible. However, just as successive generations have had to manage their information to best realise its power, we also need to manage ours. Smart data is exactly how we make sense of it all in order to drive our decisions forward.
and finally... for the love of pizza// data data data
Put simply data-driven decision making can be boiled down to pizza making.
Big data can tell you everything about making a pizza. From to the optimal temperature of the air that’s breathed by water buffalos required for the production of mozzarella, to the entire history of the pizza across the world. It could tell you how pizza fits into our culture and when it might peak, it could, of course, go further into all foods related and unrelated, it could tell you more. However only smart data will tell you how to make the pizza you want to make. That’s of course, if you want a pizza at all…