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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 QUOTATION: 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. ATTRIBUTION: Norman Cousins (1912-1990), U.S. editor, author. "Freedom as Teacher," Human Options: An Autobiographical Notebook, Norton (1981) ( : ( : pete -- Peter Baston IDEAS <http://www.ideapete.com/> www.ideapete.com
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