Peter Baston
Peter,
Nice, That’s definitely very poetic, making clear why one
needs to learn how to read beyond the facts and the data, as we are all taught
never to do…! Still it seems to omit some of the tension
within analysis which allows that to happen, and that Cousins and Whitehead both
seem likely to have been interested in too. The best
part of facts is when they add up to dissonances, overlapping ‘almost
logics’, that require new questions, and how one of the easiest things to
do with analysis is to treat whatever upsets old questions as noise… ;-)
Phil
From: [hidden email]
[mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of peter
Sent: Sunday, October 12, 2008 5:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; 1st-Mile-NM
Subject: [FRIAM] SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO what is data anyway
On the quest of how truth / morality and
honesty drive data ( or not ) I came across this priceless quotation which I
though I would share.
Call me nuts but it makes so much sense
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QUOTATION:
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There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as
there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence
with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if
it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where
they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They
are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of
raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a
very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The
computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number
until judgment is pronounced.
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ATTRIBUTION:
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Norman Cousins (1912–1990), U.S. editor, author.
“Freedom as Teacher,” Human Options: An Autobiographical
Notebook, Norton (1981)
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( : ( : pete
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