DavidBrooks has a column in the NYT highlighting the
promise and limitations of what he calls “The Philosophy of Data.” He claims number
crunching has helped expose the fallacy of some common intuitive beliefs. After
the obligatory references to sports and politics, Brooks gets to deconstruct
John Lennon: “We think of John Lennon as the most intellectual
of the Beatles, but, in fact, Paul McCartney ’s lyrics had more flexible and
diverse structures and George Harrison’s were more cognitively complex.”
I am not sure about
Brooks’s other examples, but this strikes me as a stunningly narrow and nerdy, even
quasi-autistic, mode of conceptualizing what makes an “intellectual.” According
to these benchmarks, we would probably need to crown #TempleGrandin as the
greatest #intellectual since the dawn of recorded history.
Brooks concludes his
column by saying: “In sum, the data revolution is giving us
wonderful ways to understand the present and the past. Will it transform our
ability to predict and make decisions about the future? We’ll see.” I am not sure about
that either. What seems certain, though, is that the data revolution will
increase exponentially the evidence-based hubris of the data revolutionaries
and their fellow travelers. Excessive self-confidence is, I am afraid, part of
the neurosomatic package which makes you part of that sociointellectual surge.
