
Do Data Have Politics? - qnnlu
http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/news/features/features-feature40
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chipsy
Without looking at the article, my answer was yes, because it's a
philosophical nature-of-truth kind of question. (Then I skimmed the article,
which is a mildly interesting Cold War intelligence piece.)

What guides my answer is that data models the world in ways tied to its medium
and its designed intent. A written description of an event is different from a
video of that same event. A description or video that shows more of the event,
or less of the event, may also say something different about it. And database
fields like "First Name", "Last Name", "Age", "Gender", "Race", "Nationality",
"Religion", "Sexuality", etc. are premised on subjective social norms - when
systems are designed around those fields they necessarily encode beliefs about
how people identify themselves.

When you capture different kinds of data, or when you are presented with a
filtered subset of data, your subsequent interpretation of that data changes
your view of reality, which subsequently informs your politics.

Art is frequently based around changing the model, which sometimes means
changing the medium, but often as not is accomplished through changing more
abstract rules about the piece - what techniques, themes, etc. are and are not
allowed by design.

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herbig
A great game on HN to play with titles with question marks is to guess whether
or not someone has mentioned Betteridge's Law yet. Herbig's Law says that
within 5 minutes the chance is close to 100%.

And yet, Betteridge's Law does not apply here. Everything is an argument of
some sort. It is impossible to completely divorce personal beliefs and biases
from anything. The best we can do is recognize this fact and try to come
close.

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elinchrome
If this was about the Star Trek character, it would be called "Does Data Have
Politics?" Answer (Betteridge's Law): no.

~~~
vinceguidry
That usage would have been fine for the title regardless. Treating 'data' as a
plural noun is annoyingly clumsy and should only be done if you're actually
considering individual datums and need to refer to the whole. We don't treat
'information' as plural, don't do this to 'data' either.

