Data Interpretation Quotes

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.

In short, physicians are getting more and more data, which requires more sophisticated interpretation and which takes more time. AI is the solution, enhancing every stage of patient care from research and discovery to diagnosis and therapy selection. As a result, clinical practice will become more efficient, convenient, personalized, and effective.

There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.

What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.

The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions. To make a new version of the not-entirely-false model, imagine the first interpreter as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the world. The world in this case means everything out- or inside our bodies, including serotonin levels in the brain. The second interpreter is a news analyst, who writes op-ed pieces. They read each other's work. One needs data, the other needs an overview; they influence each other. They get dialogues going. INTERPRETER ONE: Pain in the left foot, back of heel. INTERPRETER TWO: I believe that's because the shoe is too tight. INTERPRETER ONE: Checked that. Took off the shoe. Foot still hurts. INTERPRETER TWO: Did you look at it? INTERPRETER ONE: Looking. It's red. INTERPRETER TWO: No blood? INTERPRETER ONE: Nope. INTERPRETER TWO: Forget about it. INTERPRETER ONE: Okay. Mental illness seems to be a communication problem between interpreters one and two. An exemplary piece of confusion. INTERPRETER ONE: There's a tiger in the corner. INTERPRETER TWO: No, that's not a tiger- that's a bureau. INTERPRETER ONE: It's a tiger, it's a tiger! INTERPRETER TWO: Don't be ridiculous. Let's go look at it. Then all the dendrites and neurons and serotonin levels and interpreters collect themselves and trot over to the corner. If you are not crazy, the second interpreter's assertion, that this is a bureau, will be acceptable to the first interpreter. If you are crazy, the first interpreter's viewpoint, the tiger theory, will prevail. The trouble here is that the first interpreter actually sees a tiger. The messages sent between neurons are incorrect somehow. The chemicals triggered are the wrong chemicals, or the impulses are going to the wrong connections. Apparently, this happens often, but the second interpreter jumps in to straighten things out.

We do not realize how deeply our starting assumptions affect the way we go about looking for and interpreting the data we collect. We should recognize that nonhuman organisms need not meet every new definition of human language, tool use, mind, or consciousness in order to have versions of their own that are worthy of serious study. We have set ourselves too much apart, grasping for definitions that will distinguish man from all other life on the planet. We must rejoin the great stream of life from whence we arose and strive to see within it the seeds of all we are and all we may become.

materialism is a fantasy. It’s based on unnecessary postulates, circular reasoning and selective consideration of evidence and data. Materialism is by no stretch of the imagination a scientific conclusion, but merely a metaphysical opinion that helps some people interpret scientific conclusions.

ideologues of every stripe, as well as folks with interests economic, political, or personal, can interpret data and statistics to suit their own purposes...

Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

To tell an honest story, it is not enough for numbers to be correct. They need to be placed in an appropriate context so that a reader or listener can properly interpret them.

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.

We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. All observations are, as Popper put it, theory-laden,* and hence fallible, as all our theories are. Consider

The worse thing that contemporary qualitative research can imply is that, in this post-modern age, anything goes. The trick is to produce intelligent, disciplined work on the very edge of the abyss.

The Scientific Method is a wonderful tool as long as you don't care which way the outcome turns; however, this process fails the second one's perception interferes with the interpretation of data. This is why I don’t take anything in life as an absolute…even if someone can “prove” it “scientifically.

The ego is definitely an advancement, but it can be compared to the bark of the tree in many ways. The bark of the tree is flexible, extremely vibrant, and grows with the growth beneath. It is a tree’s contact with the outer world, the tree’s interpreter, and to some degree the tree’s companion. So should man’s ego be. When man’s ego turns instead into a shell, when instead of interpreting outside conditions it reacts too violently against them, then it hardens, becomes an imprisoning form that begins to snuff out important data, and to keep enlarging information from the inner self. The purpose of the ego is protective. It is also a device to enable the inner self to inhabit the physical plane. It is in other words a camouflage. It is the

All so-called ‘quantitative’ data, when scrutinized, turn out to be composites of ‘qualitative’ – i.e., contextually located and indexical – interpretations produced by situated researchers, coders, government officials and others. The

For Adamatzky, the point of fungal computers is not to replace silicon chips. Fungal reactions are too slow for that. Rather, he thinks humans could use mycelium growing in an ecosystem as a “large-scale environmental sensor.” Fungal networks, he reasons, are monitoring a large number of data streams as part of their everyday existence. If we could plug into mycelial networks and interpret the signals they use to process information, we could learn more about what was happening in an ecosystem.

The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).

Your relevance as a data custodian is your ability to analyse and interpret it. If you can’t, your replacement is due.

Our emotional reactions depend on the story we tell ourselves, the running commentary in the mind that interprets the data we receive through our senses.

The phrase 'the fossil record' sounds impressive and authoritative. As used by some persons it becomes, as intended, intimidating, taking on the aura of esoteric truth as expounded by an elite class of specialists. But what is it, really, this fossil record? Only data in search of interpretation. All claims to the contrary that I know, and I know of several, are so much superstition.

If you summarily rule out any single sensation and do not make a distinction between the element of belief that is superimposed on a percept that awaits verification and what is actually present in sensation or in the feelings or some percept of the mind itself, you will cast doubt on all other sensations by your unfounded interpretation and consequently abandon all the criteria of truth. On the other hand, in cases of interpreted data, if you accept as true those that need verification as well as those that do not, you will still be in error, since the whole question at issue in every judgment of what is true or not true will be left intact.

Clark also maintained that someone with no excavation experience was not equipped to interpret archaeological data, thereby implicitly denying the distinction that some British culture-historical archaeologists were drawing between archaeologists and prehistorians.

But all this doesn´t happen effortlessly, as demonstrated by patients who surgically recover their eyesight after decades of blindless: they do not suddenly see the world, but instead must learn to see again. At first the world is buzzing, jangling barrage of shapes and colors, and even when the optics of their eyes are perfectly functional, their brain must learn how to interpret the data coming in.

it sometimes happens that evidence accumulates across many studies to the point where scientists must change their minds. I’ve seen this happen in my colleagues (and myself) many times,34 and it’s part of the accountability system of science—you’d look foolish clinging to discredited theories. But for nonscientists, there is no such thing as a study you must believe. It’s always possible to question the methods, find an alternative interpretation of the data, or, if all else fails, question the honesty or ideology of the researchers.

The forlorn state of consciousness in our world is due primarily to loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon. The more power man had over nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data—including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness is not.

What the ethnographer is in fact faced with—except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection—is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households … writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading of”) a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.

NOBODY knows better than you what's right for you. NOBODY. Let me say what I really mean: NOBODY. Advice? Get some. Oracles? Consult them. Friends? Worship them. Actual gurus? Honour them. Final say? YOU. All you. No matter what. No matter how psychic that psychic is, or how rich the business consultant is, or how magical the healer, or bendy the yoga instructor. All that experts offer you is data for you to take into consideration. YOU are the centrifugal force that must filter, interpret, and give meaning to that data.

Our limited data force a sense of historical fragility: even as I nurture interpretation, I continually run the risk of creating it in my own image.122

Huge volumes of data may be compelling at first glance, but without an interpretive structure they are meaningless.

[...] a good interpretation makes sense of such an impressive amount of mutually corroborating data that coincidence must be excluded. Such a result cannot be reached without sound practice and good method.

One of the first shrinks I went to after Cass died told me that the brain has a hardwired need to find correlations, to make sense of nonsensical data by making connections between unrelated things. Humans have evolved a universal tendency to seek patterns in random information, hence the existence of fortune-tellers and dream interpreters and people who see the face of Jesus in a piece of toast. But the cold, hard truth is that there are no connections between anything. Life—all of existence—is totally random. Your lucky lottery numbers aren’t really lucky, because there’s no such thing as luck. The black cat that crosses your path isn’t a bad omen, it’s just a cat out for a walk. An eclipse doesn’t mean that the gods are angry, just as a bus narrowly missing you as you cross the street doesn’t mean there’s a guardian angel looking out for you. There are no gods. There are no angels. Superstitions aren’t real, and no amount of wishing, praying, or rationalizing can change the fact that life is just one long sequence of random events that ultimately have no meaning. I really hated that shrink.

As with good history, good psychoanalytic interpretations must also make sense, pull together as much of the known data as possible, provide a coherent and persuasive account, and also facilitate personal growth. Psychoanalytic

In so far as your metaphysical beliefs are implicit, you vaguely interpret the past on the lines of the present. But when it comes to the primary metaphysical data, the world of which you are immediately conscious is the whole datum.

Stay inquisitive. Question the potential interpretation of every collected data point. Remember that every successful idea has a life cycle, and a bad idea yesterday might be reformed under changing market forces as a good idea tomorrow.

David Buss has amassed a lot of evidence that human females across many cultures tend to prefer males who have high social status, good income, ambition, intelligence, and energy--contrary to the views of some cultural anthropologists, who assume that people vary capriciously in their sexual preferences across different cultures. He interpreted this as evidence that women evolved to prefer good providers who could support their families by acquiring and defending resources I respect his data enormously, but disagree with his interpretation. The traits women prefer are certainly correlated with male abilities to provide material benefits, but they are also correlated with heritable fitness. If the same traits can work both as fitness indicators and as wealth indicators, so much the better. The problem comes when we try to project wealth indicators back into a Pleistocene past when money did not exist, when status did not imply wealth, and when bands did not stay in one place long enough to defend piles of resources. Ancestral women may have preferred intelligent, energetic men for their ability to hunt more effectively and provide their children with more meat. But I would suggest it was much more important that intelligent men tended to produce intelligent, energetic children more likely to survive and reproduce, whether or not their father stayed around. In other words, I think evolutionary psychology has put too much emphasis on male resources instead of male fitness in explaining women's sexual preferences.

From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system...

It appeared that OP-20-G analysts were nourishing King’s anxieties by sending him cherry-picked data that could be interpreted as pointing to such attacks. The men who had King’s ear were unduly alarmist, and their impulsive theories might incite the fleet to chase its own tail.

Despite all their surface diversity, most jokes and funny incidents have the following logical structure: Typically you lead the listener along a garden path of expectation, slowly building up tension. At the very end, you introduce an unexpected twist that entails a complete reinterpretation of all the preceding data, and moreover, it's critical that the new interpretation, though wholly unexpected, makes as much "sense" of the entire set of facts as did the originally "expected" interpretation. In this regard, jokes have much in common with scientific creativity, with what Thomas Kuhn calls a "paradigm shift" in response to a single "anomaly." (It's probably not coincidence that many of the most creative scientists have a great sense of humor.) Of course, the anomaly in the joke is the traditional punch line and the joke is "funny" only if the listener gets the punch line by seeing in a flash of insight how a completely new interpretation of the same set of facts can incorporate the anomalous ending. The longer and more tortuous the garden path of expectation, the "funnier" the punch line when finally delivered.

There are people who learn political information for reasons other than becoming better voters. Just as sports fans love to follow their favorite teams even if they cannot influence the outcomes of games, so there are also “political fans” who enjoy following political issues and cheering for their favorite candidates, parties, or ideologies. Unfortunately, much like sports fans, political fans tend to evaluate new information in a highly biased way. They overvalue anything that supports their preexisting views, and to undervalue or ignore new data that cuts against them, even to the extent of misinterpreting simple data that they could easily interpret correctly in other contexts. Moreover, those most interested in politics are also particularly prone to discuss it only with others who agree with their views, and to follow politics only through like-minded media.

sense data are what they are, and they are infallible, being mechanically transmitted to us by atomic images from the outer world. They may be overlaid with misleading interpretations and lead to “false opinions,” 39 but they are true if confirmed by close inspection or if they are not contradicted.

There are innumerable cases like that. The Machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested. A pity the Society for Humanity won’t understand that.” “They are against the Machine?” “They would be against mathematics or against the art of writing if they had lived at the appropriate time. These reactionaries of the Society claim the Machine robs man of his soul.

This is our recurring temptation—to live within our camp’s caves, taking turns both as the shadow-puppeteers and the audience. We chant our camp’s mantras repeatedly so they continue reverberating in our skulls. When we stay entrenched within our belief-camps, we create the illusion of secure reality by reinforcing each other’s presuppositions and paradigms. We choose specific watering holes of information and evidence, and we influence each other in interpreting that data in accordance with the conclusions we desire. Our camps reinforce our existing cognitive biases, making cheating all the more common and easy.

Vision isn’t about photons that can be readily interpreted by the visual cortex. Instead it’s a whole body experience. The signals coming into the brain can only be made sense of by training, which requires cross-referencing the signals with information from our actions and sensory consequences. It’s the only way our brains can come to interpret what the visual data actually means.

One of the most significant aspects of our current situation, it should be noted, is the "crisis of meaning." Perspectives on life and the world, often of a scientific temper, have so proliferated that we face an increasing fragmentation of knowledge. This makes the search for meaning difficult and often fruitless. Indeed, still more dramatically, in this maelstrom of data and facts in which we live and which seem to comprise the very fabric of life, many people wonder whether it still makes sense to ask about meaning. The array of theories which vie to give an answer, and the different ways of viewing and of interpreting the world of human life, serve only to aggravate this radical doubt, which can easily lead to skepticism, indifference or to various forms of nihilism.

Information freedom is the freedom to access, participate in, understand and benefit from knowledge creation. This includes access to raw data, transparent auditing processes which include both elite knowledge and complete and immediate feedback from user groups and anyone else impacted, and interpretation which flows directly from the audit without interference from coercive manipulation.

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the languages of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music.

We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells. A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform. A computational process, in a correctly working computer, executes programs precisely and accurately. Thus, like the sorcerer's apprentice, novice programmers must learn to understand and to anticipate the consequences of their conjuring. Even small errors (usually called bugs or glitches) in programs can have complex and unanticipated consequences.

The problem is that many authors of papers in the medical literature allow statistics to become their master rather than their servant: numbers are plugged into a statistical program and the results are interpreted in a cut-and-dried fashion. Statistical significance (that two sets of data are not from the same population) is confused with clinical significance (that differences are sufficiently large to have a biological effect).

The materialist interpretation of the world and of science itself is protected not by the facts or by the data of our honest experiences, but by what is essentially social and professional peer pressure, something more akin to the grade-school playground or high school prom. The world is preserved through eyes rolling back, snide remarks, arrogant smirks and subtle, or not so subtle, social cues, and a kind of professional (or conjugal) shaming.

If scientists can be fooled on the question of the simple interpretation of straightforward data of the sort that they are routinely obtaining from other kinds of astronomical objects, when the stakes are high, when the emotional predispositions are working, what must be the situation where the evidence is much weaker, where the will to believe is much greater, where the skeptical scientific tradition has hardly made a toehold - namely, in the area of religion?

Reality is far too diverse, broad, elusive, ambiguous and complex for us to pin down. Even the limited empirical data we do manage to collect can only be interpreted within the framework of a subjective paradigm. It is, therefore, not really neutral. But in our desperate search for closure and reassurance we confabulate entities and explanations to construct huge edifices of assumed truths. They make up the world we actually experience; a self-woven cocoon of stories, not facts.

Tuesday, when you asked me if I would rather be smart or happy. I would rather be smart.” “Why?” “Because intellect can be proven scientifically with machines and litmus tests and IQ evaluations, but happiness is only based on a loose pool of interpretive data drawn from perception and emotion. It’s a theory, see? And I’d rather put my faith in something real than something that’s inconclusive.” “So, you don’t think happiness is real?” “I think it’s tolerable pain. Happy people have a really high tolerance, that’s all.

Schemas, whether you’re aware of yours or not, powerfully influence your thoughts, actions and behaviour. They’re the filter through which you interpret other people’s behaviour and they help you decide how to act with friends and strangers. They also help you anticipate and plan for the future, and they even govern what you notice and what you remember when new information comes along. We all pay more attention to things that reinforce our schemas and downplay or negate incoming data that conflicts with them – something known as confirmation bias.

I know very little with anything approaching certainty. I know that I was born, that I exist, and that I will die. For the most part, I can trust my brain's interpretation of the data presented to my senses: this is a rose, that is a car, she is my wife. I do not doubt the reality of the thoughts and emotions and impulses I experience in response to these things. . . . Yet apart from these primary perceptions, intuitions, inferences, and bits of information, the views that I hold about the things that really matter to me--meaning, truth, happiness, goodness, beauty--are finely woven tissues of belief and opinion.

Note that there’s no option to answer “all of the above.” Prospective workers must pick one option, without a clue as to how the program will interpret it. And some of the analysis will draw unflattering conclusions. If you go to a kindergarten class in much of the country, for example, you’ll often hear teachers emphasize to the children that they’re unique. It’s an attempt to boost their self-esteem and, of course, it’s true. Yet twelve years later, when that student chooses “unique” on a personality test while applying for a minimum-wage job, the program might read the answer as a red flag: Who wants a workforce peopled with narcissists?

Research has established that, oftentimes, when kids are struggling, it is not therapy for the child himself but coaching or therapy for the parent that leads to the most significant changes in the child. This is powerful research, because it suggests that a child’s behavior—which is an expression of a child’s emotion regulation patterns—develops in relation to a parent’s emotional maturity. There are two ways to interpret this data. The first is, “Oh no, I’m messing up my kid because I’m messed up. I’m the worst!” But there’s another, more optimistic and encouraging interpretation: “Wow, this is amazing. If I can work on some of my own emotion regulation abilities—which will feel good for me anyway!—my

The Scientific Revolution proposed a very different formula for knowledge: Knowledge = Empirical Data × Mathematics. If we want to know the answer to some question, we need to gather relevant empirical data, and then use mathematical tools to analyse the data. For example, in order to gauge the true shape of the earth, we can observe the sun, the moon and the planets from various locations across the world. Once we have amassed enough observations, we can use trigonometry to deduce not only the shape of the earth, but also the structure of the entire solar system. In practice, that means that scientists seek knowledge by spending years in observatories, laboratories and research expeditions, gathering more and more empirical data, and sharpening their mathematical tools so they could interpret the data correctly. The scientific formula for knowledge led to astounding breakthroughs in astronomy, physics, medicine and countless other disciplines. But it had one huge drawback: it could not deal with questions of value and meaning. Medieval pundits could determine with absolute certainty that it is wrong to murder and steal, and that the purpose of human life is to do God’s bidding, because scriptures said so. Scientists could not come up with such ethical judgements. No amount of data and no mathematical wizardry can prove that it is wrong to murder. Yet human societies cannot survive without such value judgements.

Probability theory naturally comes into play in what we shall call situation 1: When the data-point can be considered to be generated by some randomizing device, for example when throwing dice, flipping coins, or randomly allocating an individual to a medical treatment using a pseudo-random-number generator, and then recording the outcomes of their treatment. But in practice we may be faced with situation 2: When a pre-existing data-point is chosen by a randomizing device, say when selecting people to take part in a survey. And much of the time our data arises from situation 3: When there is no randomness at all, but we act as if the data-point were in fact generated by some random process, for example in interpreting the birth weight of our friend’s baby.

G. Stanley Hall, a creature of his times, believed strongly that adolescence was determined – a fixed feature of human development that could be explained and accounted for in scientific fashion. To make his case, he relied on Haeckel's faulty recapitulation idea, Lombroso's faulty phrenology-inspired theories of crime, a plethora of anecdotes and one-sided interpretations of data. Given the issues, theories, standards and data-handling methods of his day, he did a superb job. But when you take away the shoddy theories, put the anecdotes in their place, and look for alternate explanations of the data, the bronze statue tumbles hard. I have no doubt that many of the street teens of Hall's time were suffering or insufferable, but it's a serious mistake to develop a timeless, universal theory of human nature around the peculiarities of the people of one's own time and place.

The data that drives algorithms isn't just a few numbers now. It's monstrous tables of millions of numbers, thousands upon thousands of rows and columns of numbers....Matrices are created and refined by computers endlessly churning through Big Data's records on everyone, and everything they've done. No human can read those matrices, even with computers helping you interpret them they are simply too large and complex to fully comprehend. But the computers can use them, applying the appropriate matrix to show us the appropriate video that will eventually lead us to make an appropriate purchase. We are not living in "The Matrix," but there's still a matrix controlling us. What does this have to do with the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories? It has everything to do with it. These algorithms are quickly becoming the primary route down the rabbit hole. To a large extent this has already happened, but it's going to get far, far worse. Tufekci described what happened when she tried watching different types of content on YouTube. She started watching videos of Donald Trump rallies. 'I wanted to write about one of [Donald Trump]'s rallies, so I watched it a few times on YouTube. YouTube started recommending to me, and autoplaying to me, white supremacist videos, in increasing order of extremism. If I watched one, it served up one even more extreme. If you watch Hilary Clinton or Bernie Sanders content, YouTube recommends and autoplays [left-wing] conspiracy videos, and it goes downhill from there." Downhill, into the rabbit hole....Without human intervention the algorithm has evolved to a perfect a method of gently stepping up the intensity of the conspiracy videos that it shows you so that you don't get turned off, and so you continue to watch. They get more intense because the algorithm has found (not in any human sense, but found nonetheless) that the deeper it can guide people down the rabbit hole, the more revenue it can make.

The pursuit of the past makes you aware, whether you are novelist or historian, of the dangers of your own fallibility and inbuilt bias. The writer of history is a walking anachronism, a displaced person, using today’s techniques to try to know things about yesterday that yesterday didn’t know itself. He must try to work authentically, hearing the words of the past, but communicating in a language the present understands. The historian, the biographer, the writer of fiction work within different constraints, but in a way that is complementary, not opposite. The novelist’s trade is never just about making things up. The historian’s trade is never simply about stockpiling facts. Even the driest, most data-driven research involves an element of interpretation. Deep research in the archives can be reported in tabular form and lists, by historians talking to each other. But to talk to their public, they use the same devices as all storytellers – selection, elision, artful arrangement.

Jacobs, whose faith in Moore’s Law was as strong as ever, thought a more complicated system of frequency-hopping would work better. Rather than keeping a given phone call on a certain frequency, he proposed moving call data between different frequencies, letting him cram more calls into available spectrum space. Most people thought he was right in theory, but that such a system would never work in practice. Voice quality would be low, they argued, and calls would be dropped. The amount of processing needed to move call data between frequencies and have it interpreted by a phone on the other end seemed enormous. Jacobs disagreed, founding a company called Qualcomm—Quality Communications—in 1985 to prove the point. He built a small network with a couple cell towers to prove it would work. Soon the entire industry realized Qualcomm’s system would make it possible to fit far more cell phone calls into existing spectrum space by relying on Moore’s Law to run the algorithms that make sense of all the radio waves bouncing around.

A few years ago my friend Jon Brooks supplied this great illustration of skewed interpretation at work. Here’s how investors react to events when they’re feeling good about life (which usually means the market has been rising): Strong data: economy strengthening—stocks rally Weak data: Fed likely to ease—stocks rally Data as expected: low volatility—stocks rally Banks make $4 billion: business conditions favorable—stocks rally Banks lose $4 billion: bad news out of the way—stocks rally Oil spikes: growing global economy contributing to demand—stocks rally Oil drops: more purchasing power for the consumer—stocks rally Dollar plunges: great for exporters—stocks rally Dollar strengthens: great for companies that buy from abroad—stocks rally Inflation spikes: will cause assets to appreciate—stocks rally Inflation drops: improves quality of earnings—stocks rally Of course, the same behavior also applies in the opposite direction. When psychology is negative and markets have been falling for a while, everything is capable of being interpreted negatively. Strong economic data is seen as likely to make the Fed withdraw stimulus by raising interest rates, and weak data is taken to mean companies will have trouble meeting earnings forecasts. In other words, it’s not the data or events; it’s the interpretation. And that fluctuates with swings in psychology.

Several recent studies (Bliss, 1980; Boon & Draijer, 1993a; Coons & Milstein, 1986; Coons, Bowman, & Milstein, 1988; Putnam et al., 1986; Ross et al., 1989b) are largely consistent in terms of the general trends that they demonstrate. At the time of diagnosis (prior to exploration) approximately two to four personalities are in evidence. In the course of treatment an average of 13 to 15 are encountered, but this figure is deceptive. The mode in virtually all series is three, and median number of alters is eight to ten. Complex cases, with 26 or more alters (described in Kluft, 1988), constitute 15-25% of such series and unduly inflate the mean. Series currently being studied in tertiary referral centers appear to be more complex still (Kluft, Fink, Brenner, & Fine, unpublished data). This is subject to a number of interpretations. It is likely that the complexity of the more difficult and demanding cases treated in such settings may be one aspect of what makes them require such specialized care. It is also possible that the staff of such centers is differentially sensitive to the need to probe for previously undiscovered complexity in their efforts to treat patients who have failed to improve elsewhere. However, it is also possible that patients unduly interested in their disorders and who generate factitious complexity enter such series differently, or that some factor in these units or in those who refer to them encourages such complexity or at least the subjective report thereof.

The motor activities we take for granted—getting out of a chair and walking across a room, picking up a cup and drinking coffee,and so on—require integration of all the muscles and sensory organs working smoothly together to produce coordinated movements that we don't even have to think about. No one has ever explained how the simple code of impulses can do all that. Even more troublesome are the higher processes, such as sight—in which somehow we interpret a constantly changing scene made of innumerable bits of visual data—or the speech patterns, symbol recognition, and grammar of our languages.Heading the list of riddles is the "mind-brain problem" of consciousness, with its recognition, "I am real; I think; I am something special." Then there are abstract thought, memory, personality,creativity, and dreams. The story goes that Otto Loewi had wrestled with the problem of the synapse for a long time without result, when one night he had a dream in which the entire frog-heart experiment was revealed to him. When he awoke, he knew he'd had the dream, but he'd forgotten the details. The next night he had the same dream. This time he remembered the procedure, went to his lab in the morning, did the experiment, and solved the problem. The inspiration that seemed to banish neural electricity forever can't be explained by the theory it supported! How do you convert simple digital messages into these complex phenomena? Latter-day mechanists have simply postulated brain circuitry so intricate that we will probably never figure it out, but some scientists have said there must be other factors.

To claim that mathematics is purely a human invention and is successful in explaining nature only because of evolution and natural selection ignores some important facts in the nature of mathematics and in the history of theoretical models of the universe. First, while the mathematical rules (e.g., the axioms of geometry or of set theory) are indeed creations of the human mind, once those rules are specified, we lose our freedom. The definition of the Golden Ratio emerged originally from the axioms of Euclidean geometry; the definition of the Fibonacci sequence from the axioms of the theory of numbers. Yet the fact that the ratio of successive Fibonacci numbers converges to the Golden Ratio was imposed on us-humans had not choice in the matter. Therefore, mathematical objects, albeit imaginary, do have real properties. Second, the explanation of the unreasonable power of mathematics cannot be based entirely on evolution in the restricted sense. For example, when Newton proposed his theory of gravitation, the data that he was trying to explain were at best accurate to three significant figures. Yet his mathematical model for the force between any two masses in the universe achieved the incredible precision of better than one part in a million. Hence, that particular model was not forced on Newton by existing measurements of the motions of planets, nor did Newton force a natural phenomenon into a preexisting mathematical pattern. Furthermore, natural selection in the common interpretation of that concept does not quite apply either, because it was not the case that five competing theories were proposed, of which one eventually won. Rather, Newton's was the only game in town!

Well before the end of the 20th century however print had lost its former dominance. This resulted in, among other things, a different kind of person getting elected as leader. One who can present himself and his programs in a polished way, as Lee Quan Yu you observed in 2000, adding, “Satellite television has allowed me to follow the American presidential campaign. I am amazed at the way media professionals can give a candidate a new image and transform him, at least superficially, into a different personality. Winning an election becomes, in large measure, a contest in packaging and advertising. Just as the benefits of the printed era were inextricable from its costs, so it is with the visual age. With screens in every home entertainment is omnipresent and boredom a rarity. More substantively, injustice visualized is more visceral than injustice described. Television played a crucial role in the American Civil rights movement, yet the costs of television are substantial, privileging emotional display over self-command, changing the kinds of people and arguments that are taken seriously in public life. The shift from print to visual culture continues with the contemporary entrenchment of the Internet and social media, which bring with them four biases that make it more difficult for leaders to develop their capabilities than in the age of print. These are immediacy, intensity, polarity, and conformity. Although the Internet makes news and data more immediately accessible than ever, this surfeit of information has hardly made us individually more knowledgeable, let alone wiser, as the cost of accessing information becomes negligible, as with the Internet, the incentives to remember it seem to weaken. While forgetting anyone fact may not matter, the systematic failure to internalize information brings about a change in perception, and a weakening of analytical ability. Facts are rarely self-explanatory; their significance and interpretation depend on context and relevance. For information to be transmuted into something approaching wisdom it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience. As a general rule, images speak at a more emotional register of intensity than do words. Television and social media rely on images that inflamed the passions, threatening to overwhelm leadership with the combination of personal and mass emotion. Social media, in particular, have encouraged users to become image conscious spin doctors. All this engenders a more populist politics that celebrates utterances perceived to be authentic over the polished sound bites of the television era, not to mention the more analytical output of print. The architects of the Internet thought of their invention as an ingenious means of connecting the world. In reality, it has also yielded a new way to divide humanity into warring tribes. Polarity and conformity rely upon, and reinforce, each other. One is shunted into a group, and then the group polices once thinking. Small wonder that on many contemporary social media platforms, users are divided into followers and influencers. There are no leaders. What are the consequences for leadership? In our present circumstances, Lee's gloomy assessment of visual media's effects is relevant. From such a process, I doubt if a Churchill or Roosevelt or a de Gaulle can emerge. It is not that changes in communications technology have made inspired leadership and deep thinking about world order impossible, but that in an age dominated by television and the Internet, thoughtful leaders must struggle against the tide.

..."facts" properly speaking are always and never more than interpretations of the data... the Gospel accounts are themselves such data or, if you like, hard facts. But the events to which the Gospels refer are not themselves "hard facts"; they are facts only in the sense that we interpret the text, together with such other data as we have, to reach a conclusion regarding the events as best we are able. They are facts in the same way that the verdict of a jury establishes the facts of the case, the interpretation of the evidence that results in the verdict delivered. Here it is as well to remember that historical methodology can only produce probabilities, the probability that some event took place in such circumstances being greater or smaller, depending on the quality of the data and the perspective of the historical enquirer. The jury which decides what is beyond reasonable doubt is determining that the probability is sufficiently high for a clear-cut verdict to be delivered. Those who like "certainty" in matters of faith will always find this uncomfortable. But faith is not knowledge of "hard facts"...; it is rather confidence, assurance, trust in the reliability of the data and in the integrity of the interpretations derived from that data... It does seem important to me that those who speak for evangelical Christians grasp this nettle firmly, even if it stings! – it is important for the intellectual integrity of evangelicals. Of course any Christian (and particularly evangelical Christians) will want to get as close as possible to the Jesus who ministered in Galilee in the late 20s of the first century. If, as they believe, God spoke in and through that man, more definitively and finally than at any other time and by any other medium, then of course Christians will want to hear as clearly as possible what he said, and to see as clearly as possible what he did, to come as close as possible to being an eyewitness and earwitness for themselves. If God revealed himself most definitively in the historical particularity of a Galilean Jew in the earliest decades of the Common Era, then naturally those who believe this will want to inquire as closely into the historical particularity and actuality of that life and of Jesus’ mission. The possibility that later faith has in some degree covered over that historical actuality cannot be dismissed as out of the question. So a genuinely critical historical inquiry is necessary if we are to get as close to the historical actuality as possible. Critical here, and this is the point, should not be taken to mean negatively critical, hermeneutical suspicion, dismissal of any material that has overtones of Easter faith. It means, more straightforwardly, a careful scrutiny of all the relevant data to gain as accurate or as historically responsible a picture as possible. In a day when evangelical, and even Christian, is often identified with a strongly right-wing, conservative and even fundamentalist attitude to the Bible, it is important that responsible evangelical scholars defend and advocate such critical historical inquiry and that their work display its positive outcome and benefits. These include believers growing in maturity • to recognize gray areas and questions to which no clear-cut answer can be given (‘we see in a mirror dimly/a poor reflection’), • to discern what really matters and distinguish them from issues that matter little, • and be able to engage in genuine dialogue with those who share or respect a faith inquiring after truth and seeking deeper understanding. In that way we may hope that evangelical (not to mention Christian) can again become a label that men and women of integrity and good will can respect and hope to learn from more than most seem to do today.

But states have difficulty evaluating cybersecurity threats. If a state does detect an intrusion in one of its vital networks and if that intrusion looks to be from another state, what should the state suffering the intrusion conclude? On the one hand, it might be a defensive-minded intrusion, only checking out the intruded-upon state’s capabilities and providing reassuring intelligence to the intruding state. This might seem unsettling but not necessarily threatening, presuming the state suffering the intrusion was not developing capabilities for attack or seeking conflict. On the other hand, the intrusion might be more nefarious. It could be a sign of some coming harm, such as a cyber attack or an expanding espionage operation. The state suffering the intrusion will have to decide which of these two possibilities is correct, interpreting limited and almost certainly insufficient amounts of data to divine the intentions of another state. Thus Chapter Four’s argument is vitally important: intrusions into a state’s strategically important networks pose serious risks and are therefore inherently threatening. Intrusions launched by one state into the networks of another can cause a great deal of harm at inopportune times, even if the intrusion at the moment of discovery appears to be reasonably benign. The intrusion can also perform reconnaissance that enables a powerful and well-targeted cyber attack. Even operations launched with fully defensive intent can serve as beachheads for future attack operations, so long as a command and control mechanism is set up. Depending on its target, the intrusion can collect information that provides great insight into the communications and strategies of policy-makers. Network intrusions can also pose serious counterintelligence risks, revealing what secrets a state has learned about other states and provoking a damaging sense of paranoia. Given these very real threats, states are likely to view any serious intrusion with some degree of fear. They therefore have significant incentive to respond strongly, further animating the cybersecurity dilemma.

The textbooks of history prepared for the public schools are marked by a rather naive parochialism and chauvinism. There is no need to dwell on such futilities. But it must be admitted that even for the most conscientious historian abstention from judgments of value may offer certain difficulties. As a man and as a citizen the historian takes sides in many feuds and controversies of his age. It is not easy to combine scientific aloofness in historical studies with partisanship in mundane interests. But that can and has been achieved by outstanding historians. The historian's world view may color his work. His representation of events may be interlarded with remarks that betray his feelings and wishes and divulge his party affiliation. However, the postulate of scientific history's abstention from value judgments is not infringed by occasional remarks expressing the preferences of the historian if the general purport of the study is not affected. If the writer, speaking of an inept commander of the forces of his own nation or party, says "unfortunately" the general was not equal to his task, he has not failed in his duty as a historian. The historian is free to lament the destruction of the masterpieces of Greek art provided his regret does not influence his report of the events that brought about this destruction. The problem of Wertfreíheit must also be clearly distinguished from that of the choice of theories resorted to for the interpretation of facts. In dealing with the data available, the historian needs ali the knowledge provided by the other disciplines, by logic, mathematics, praxeology, and the natural sciences. If what these disciplines teach is insufficient or if the historian chooses an erroneous theory out of several conflicting theories held by the specialists, his effort is misled and his performance is abortive. It may be that he chose an untenable theory because he was biased and this theory best suited his party spirit. But the acceptance of a faulty doctrine may often be merely the outcome of ignorance or of the fact that it enjoys greater popularity than more correct doctrines. The main source of dissent among historians is divergence in regard to the teachings of ali the other branches of knowledge upon which they base their presentation. To a historian of earlier days who believed in witchcraft, magic, and the devil's interference with human affairs, things hàd a different aspect than they have for an agnostic historian. The neomercantilist doctrines of the balance of payments and of the dollar shortage give an image of presentday world conditions very different from that provided by an examination of the situation from the point of view of modern subjectivist economics.

Dr. Hobson (with Dr. Robert McCarley) made history by proposing the first serious challenge to Freud’s theory of dreams, called the “activation synthesis theory.” In 1977, they proposed the idea that dreams originate from random neural firings in the brain stem, which travel up to the cortex, which then tries to make sense of these random signals. The key to dreams lies in nodes found in the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, which squirts out special chemicals, called adrenergics, that keep us alert. As we go to sleep, the brain stem activates another system, the cholinergic, which emits chemicals that put us in a dream state. As we dream, cholinergic neurons in the brain stem begin to fire, setting off erratic pulses of electrical energy called PGO (pontine-geniculate-occipital) waves. These waves travel up the brain stem into the visual cortex, stimulating it to create dreams. Cells in the visual cortex begin to resonate hundreds of times per second in an irregular fashion, which is perhaps responsible for the sometimes incoherent nature of dreams. This system also emits chemicals that decouple parts of the brain involved with reason and logic. The lack of checks coming from the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, along with the brain becoming extremely sensitive to stray thoughts, may account for the bizarre, erratic nature of dreams. Studies have shown that it is possible to enter the cholinergic state without sleep. Dr. Edgar Garcia-Rill of the University of Arkansas claims that meditation, worrying, or being placed in an isolation tank can induce this cholinergic state. Pilots and drivers facing the monotony of a blank windshield for many hours may also enter this state. In his research, he has found that schizophrenics have an unusually large number of cholinergic neurons in their brain stem, which may explain some of their hallucinations. To make his studies more efficient, Dr. Allan Hobson had his subjects put on a special nightcap that can automatically record data during a dream. One sensor connected to the nightcap registers the movements of a person’s head (because head movements usually occur when dreams end). Another sensor measures movements of the eyelids (because REM sleep causes eyelids to move). When his subjects wake up, they immediately record what they dreamed about, and the information from the nightcap is fed into a computer. In this way, Dr. Hobson has accumulated a vast amount of information about dreams. So what is the meaning of dreams? I asked him. He dismisses what he calls the “mystique of fortune-cookie dream interpretation.” He does not see any hidden message from the cosmos in dreams. Instead, he believes that after the PGO waves surge from the brain stem into the cortical areas, the cortex is trying to make sense of these erratic signals and winds up creating a narrative out of them: a dream.

What are these substances? Medicines or drugs or sacramental foods? It is easier to say what they are not. They are not narcotics, nor intoxicants, nor energizers, nor anaesthetics, nor tranquilizers. They are, rather, biochemical keys which unlock experiences shatteringly new to most Westerners. For the last two years, staff members of the Center for Research in Personality at Harvard University have engaged in systematic experiments with these substances. Our first inquiry into the biochemical expansion of consciousness has been a study of the reactions of Americans in a supportive, comfortable naturalistic setting. We have had the opportunity of participating in over one thousand individual administrations. From our observations, from interviews and reports, from analysis of questionnaire data, and from pre- and postexperimental differences in personality test results, certain conclusions have emerged. (1) These substances do alter consciousness. There is no dispute on this score. (2) It is meaningless to talk more specifically about the “effect of the drug.” Set and setting, expectation, and atmosphere account for all specificity of reaction. There is no “drug reaction” but always setting-plus-drug. (3) In talking about potentialities it is useful to consider not just the setting-plus-drug but rather the potentialities of the human cortex to create images and experiences far beyond the narrow limitations of words and concepts. Those of us on this research project spend a good share of our working hours listening to people talk about the effect and use of consciousness-altering drugs. If we substitute the words human cortex for drug we can then agree with any statement made about the potentialities—for good or evil, for helping or hurting, for loving or fearing. Potentialities of the cortex, not of the drug. The drug is just an instrument. In analyzing and interpreting the results of our studies we looked first to the conventional models of modern psychology—psychoanalytic, behavioristic—and found these concepts quite inadequate to map the richness and breadth of expanded consciousness. To understand our findings we have finally been forced back on a language and point of view quite alien to us who are trained in the traditions of mechanistic objective psychology. We have had to return again and again to the nondualistic conceptions of Eastern philosophy, a theory of mind made more explicit and familiar in our Western world by Bergson, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts. In the first part of this book Mr. Watts presents with beautiful clarity this theory of consciousness, which we have seen confirmed in the accounts of our research subjects—philosophers, unlettered convicts, housewives, intellectuals, alcoholics. The leap across entangling thickets of the verbal, to identify with the totality of the experienced, is a phenomenon reported over and over by these persons.

Our patients predict the culture by living out consciously what the masses of people are able to keep unconscious for the time being. The neurotic is cast by destiny into a Cassandra role. In vain does Cassandra, sitting on the steps of the palace at Mycenae when Agamemnon brings her back from Troy, cry, “Oh for the nightingale’s pure song and a fate like hers!” She knows, in her ill-starred life, that “the pain flooding the song of sorrow is [hers] alone,” and that she must predict the doom she sees will occur there. The Mycenaeans speak of her as mad, but they also believe she does speak the truth, and that she has a special power to anticipate events. Today, the person with psychological problems bears the burdens of the conflicts of the times in his blood, and is fated to predict in his actions and struggles the issues which will later erupt on all sides in the society. The first and clearest demonstration of this thesis is seen in the sexual problems which Freud found in his Victorian patients in the two decades before World War I. These sexual topics‒even down to the words‒were entirely denied and repressed by the accepted society at the time. But the problems burst violently forth into endemic form two decades later after World War II. In the 1920's, everybody was preoccupied with sex and its functions. Not by the furthest stretch of the imagination can anyone argue that Freud "caused" this emergence. He rather reflected and interpreted, through the data revealed by his patients, the underlying conflicts of the society, which the “normal” members could and did succeed in repressing for the time being. Neurotic problems are the language of the unconscious emerging into social awareness. A second, more minor example is seen in the great amount of hostility which was found in patients in the 1930's. This was written about by Horney, among others, and it emerged more broadly and openly as a conscious phenomenon in our society a decade later. A third major example may be seen in the problem of anxiety. In the late 1930's and early 1940's, some therapists, including myself, were impressed by the fact that in many of our patients anxiety was appearing not merely as a symptom of repression or pathology, but as a generalized character state. My research on anxiety, and that of Hobart Mowrer and others, began in the early 1940's. In those days very little concern had been shown in this country for anxiety other than as a symptom of pathology. I recall arguing in the late 1940's, in my doctoral orals, for the concept of normal anxiety, and my professors heard me with respectful silence but with considerable frowning. Predictive as the artists are, the poet W. H. Auden published his Age of Anxiety in 1947, and just after that Bernstein wrote his symphony on that theme. Camus was then writing (1947) about this “century of fear,” and Kafka already had created powerful vignettes of the coming age of anxiety in his novels, most of them as yet untranslated. The formulations of the scientific establishment, as is normal, lagged behind what our patients were trying to tell us. Thus, at the annual convention of the American Psychopathological Association in 1949 on the theme “Anxiety,” the concept of normal anxiety, presented in a paper by me, was still denied by most of the psychiatrists and psychologists present. But in the 1950's a radical change became evident; everyone was talking about anxiety and there were conferences on the problem on every hand. Now the concept of "normal" anxiety gradually became accepted in the psychiatric literature. Everybody, normal as well as neurotic, seemed aware that he was living in the “age of anxiety.” What had been presented by the artists and had appeared in our patients in the late 30's and 40's was now endemic in the land.

The Machine is only a tool after all, which can help humanity progress faster by taking some of the burdens of calculations and interpretations off its back. The task of the human brain remains what it has always been; that of discovering new data to be analyzed, and of devising new concepts to be tested.

addition, the industrial-strength analytic tools necessary to interpret so much data can’t always detect irony, sarcasm, and other subtle human tricks.

It’s tempting to think that the male bias that is embedded in language is simply a relic of more regressive times, but the evidence does not point that way. The world’s ‘fastest-growing language’,34 used by more than 90% of the world’s online population, is emoji.35 This language originated in Japan in the 1980s and women are its heaviest users:36 78% of women versus 60% of men frequently use emoji.37 And yet, until 2016, the world of emojis was curiously male. The emojis we have on our smartphones are chosen by the rather grand-sounding ‘Unicode Consortium’, a Silicon Valley-based group of organisations that work together to ensure universal, international software standards. If Unicode decides a particular emoji (say ‘spy’) should be added to the current stable, they will decide on the code that should be used. Each phone manufacturer (or platform such as Twitter and Facebook) will then design their own interpretation of what a ‘spy’ looks like. But they will all use the same code, so that when users communicate between different platforms, they are broadly all saying the same thing. An emoji face with heart eyes is an emoji face with heart eyes. Unicode has not historically specified the gender for most emoji characters. The emoji that most platforms originally represented as a man running, was not called ‘man running’. It was just called ‘runner’. Similarly the original emoji for police officer was described by Unicode as ‘police officer’, not ‘policeman’. It was the individual platforms that all interpreted these gender-neutral terms as male. In 2016, Unicode decided to do something about this. Abandoning their previously ‘neutral’ gender stance, they decided to explicitly gender all emojis that depicted people.38 So instead of ‘runner’ which had been universally represented as ‘male runner’, Unicode issued code for explicitly male runner and explicitly female runner. Male and female options now exist for all professions and athletes. It’s a small victory, but a significant one.

Thinking about the projector as a performance tool, a display mechanism, a playback machine, a decompressor of content, an image-enlarger, a sound amplifier, a recording device, and an audiovisual interface carries far richer interpretive possibilities than thinking about it as the poor cousin of the movie theater. It also helps us to explain more about why film has long mattered across many realms of cultural and institutional activity. Critically shifting how we conceptualize what a projector is and does opens a window to a wider array of other media devices that performed the work of storing, decompressing, and yielding content, as well as interfacing with users, viewers, and analysts. Drawing on innovations in precision mechanics, chemistry, optics, and electrical and eventually acoustic and magnetic engineering, projectors catalyzed alternate ways of presenting recorded images and sounds, converting celluloid and its otherwise indecipherable inscriptions into visible and audible content, usable data, productive lessons, and persuasive messaging. In doing so they shaped performance and presentation for audiences of

Empirical evidence is not what counts. Rational proof is the only acceptable criterion of truth. If you cannot provide a sufficient reason for an argument you make, you do not have an argument. Sensory evidence is not a sufficient reason. It is not an argument. Sensory evidence is simply raw data. A million people could provide a million different ways of interpreting it, hence it’s meaningless. It has nothing to do with proof. “Evidence” concerns an appearance from which inferences may be drawn. It concerns that which is obvious to the eye. Yet what does “obvious” mean? What is obvious about sensory data? Color blind people don’t know what “blue” is. Tetrachromats, with four cone types in the eye (cone cells are responsible for color vision, while rod cells code for monochromatic vision) see color radically differently from normal people (i.e. trichromats with three cone types). People with synesthesia have drastically different sensory experiences from normal people. So, everything about the senses is mired in ambiguity, uncertainty and subjectivity. These are no organs for truth, i.e. organs that show us the truth of a thing, exactly what it is and everything about it. We see things in our dreams even though our eyes are closed. How can we see without eyes, how can we sense without sense organs? What’s for sure is that scientific empiricism and materialism won’t be furnishing any answers.

Seeing children's assemblage points constantly fluttering, as if moved by tremors, changing their place with ease, the old sorcerers came to the conclusion that the assemblage points habitual location is not innate but brought about by habituation. Seeing also that only in adults is it fixed on one spot, they surmised that the specific location of the assemblage point fosters a specific way of perceiving. Through usage, this specific way of perceiving becomes a system of interpreting sensory data. Since we are drafted into that system by being born into it, from the moment of our birth we imperatively strive to adjust our perceiving to conform to the demands of this system, a system that rules us for life. Consequently, the old sorcerers were thoroughly right in believing that the act of countermanding it and perceiving energy directly is what transforms a person into a sorcerer.

General Tips for Better-than-Average Lie-Detecting Sit back and let the other person volunteer information, rather than pulling it out of them. Don’t let on what you know too early—or at all. Stay relaxed and causal. What you are observing is not the person themselves, but the person as they are in a quasi-interrogational situation with you. So don’t make it seem like an inquisition, otherwise you may simply be watching them feel distressed about the situation itself. Don’t worry about individual signs and clues like touching the nose, looking up to the right or stuttering. Rather, look at how the person responds in general to shifts in the conversation, especially at junctures where you believe they may be having to concoct a story on the fly. Listen for stories that seem unusually long or detailed—liars use more words, and they may even talk more quickly. Take your time. It may be a while before you uncover a deception. But the longer the other person talks, the more chance they have of slipping up or getting their story tangled. Watch primarily for inconsistencies—details of the story that don’t add up, emotional expressions that don’t fit the story, or abrupt shifts in the way the story is told. Being chatty and then all of a sudden getting quiet and serious when you ask a particular question is certainly telling. Always interpret your conversation in light of what you already know, the context, and other details you’ve observed in your interactions with this person. It’s all about looking at patterns, and then trying to determine if any disruptions in that pattern point to something interesting. Don’t be afraid to trust your gut instinct! Your unconscious mind may have picked up some data your conscious mind hasn’t become aware of. Don’t make decisions on intuition alone, but don’t dismiss it too quickly, either. Takeaways Casual observation of body language, voice and verbal cues can help with understanding honest people, but we need more sophisticated techniques to help us detect liars. Most people are not as good at spotting deception as they think they are. Bias, expectation and the belief that we can’t or shouldn’t be lied to can get in the way of realizing we’re being deceived. Good lie detection is a dynamic process that focuses on the conversation. Use open ended questions to get people to surrender information voluntarily, and observe. Look out for overly wordy stories that are presented all at once, inconsistencies in the story or emotional affect, delays or avoidance in answering questions, or inability to answer unexpected questions. Liars are easier to spot when lying is spontaneous—try not to allow the liar any time to prepare or rehearse a script, or else ask unexpected questions or plant a lie yourself to watch their response and gain a baseline against which to compare the possible lie. Increasing cognitive load can cause a liar to fumble their story or lose track of details, revealing themselves in a lie. Keep drilling for detail and be suspicious if details don’t add up, if emotion doesn’t match content, or if the person is deliberately stalling for time. Look out for specific signs that a person is cognitively overloaded. One example is that the liar will display less emotions while speaking than they or an average person normally would in their situation. These emotions will instead leak through in their body language. Most commonly, this manifests in more frequent blinking, pupil dilation, speech disturbances, and slips of tongue. Spotting liars is notoriously difficult, but we improve our chances when we focus on strategic and targeted conversations designed to make the liar trip up on his own story, rather than trying to guess hidden intentions from body language alone.

To make this point, I often do the same coin flipping exercise that I explained during the probability discussion. In a class of forty students or so, I’ll have each student flip a coin. Any student who flips tails is eliminated; the rest flip again. In the second round, those who flip tails are once again eliminated. I continue the rounds of flipping until one student has flipped five or six heads in a row. You may recall some of the silly follow-up questions: “What’s your secret? Is it in the wrist? Can you teach us to flip heads all the time? Maybe it’s that Harvard sweatshirt you’re wearing.” Obviously the string of heads is just luck; the students have all watched it happen. However, that is not necessarily how the result could or would be interpreted in a scientific context. The probability of flipping five heads in a row is 1/32, or .03. This is comfortably below the .05 threshold we typically use to reject a null hypothesis. Our null hypothesis in this case is that the student has no special talent for flipping heads; the lucky string of heads (which is bound to happen for at least one student when I start with a large group) allows us to reject the null hypothesis and adopt the alternative hypothesis: This student has a special ability to flip heads. After he has achieved this impressive feat, we can study him for clues about his flipping success—his flipping form, his athletic training, his extraordinary concentration while the coin is in the air, and so on. And it is all nonsense. This phenomenon can plague even legitimate research. The accepted convention is to reject a null hypothesis when we observe something that would happen by chance only 1 in 20 times or less if the null hypothesis were true. Of course, if we conduct 20 studies, or if we include 20 junk variables in a single regression equation, then on average we will get 1 bogus statistically significant finding.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed that scientists spend long periods taking small steps. They pose and solve puzzles while collectively interpreting all data within a fixed worldview or theoretical framework, which Kuhn called a paradigm. Sooner or later, though, facts crop up that clash with the reigning paradigm. Crisis ensues. The scientists wring their hands, reexamine their assumptions, and eventually make a revolutionary shift to a new paradigm, a radically different and truer understanding of nature. Then incremental progress resumes.

In script mode, we type Python program in a file and save them with file extension of .py and then use the interpreter to execute the contents from the file. Script mode helps us reuse the saved set of command anytime we require.

How can you run Analytics “as one”? If you leave Analytics to IT, you will end up with a first-class race car without a driver: All the technology would be there, but hardly anybody could apply it to real-world questions. Where Analytics is left to Business, however, you’d probably see various functional silos develop, especially in larger organizations. I have never seen a self-organized, cross-functional Analytics approach take shape successfully in such an organization. Instead, you can expect each Analytics silo to develop independently. They will have experts familiar with their business area, which allows for the right questions to be asked. On the other hand, the technical solutions will probably be second class as the functional Analytics department will mostly lack the critical mass to mimic an organization’s entire IT intelligence. Furthermore, a lot of business topics will be addressed several times in parallel, as those Analytics silos may not talk to each other. You see this frequently in organizations that are too big for one central management team. They subdivide management either into functional groups or geographical groups. Federation is generally seen as an organizational necessity. It is well known that it does not make sense to regularly gather dozens of managers around the same table: You’d quickly see a small group discussing topics that are specific to a business function or a country organization, while the rest would get bored. A federated approach in Analytics, however, comes with risks. The list of disadvantages reaches from duplicate work to inconsistent interpretation of data. You can avoid these disadvantages by designing a central Data Analytics entity as part of your Data Office at an early stage, to create a common basis across all of these areas. As you can imagine, such a design requires authority, as it would ask functional silos to give up part of their autonomy. That is why it is worthwhile creating a story around this for your organization’s Management Board. You’d describe the current setup, the behavior it fosters, and the consequences including their financial impact. Then you’d present a governance structure that would address the situation and make the organization “future-proof.” Typical aspects of such a proposal would be The role of IT as the entity with a monopoly for technology and with the obligation to consider the Analytics teams of the business functions as their customers The necessity for common data standards across all of those silos, including their responsibility within the Data Office Central coordination of data knowledge management, including training, sharing of experience, joint cross-silo expert groups, and projects Organization-wide, business-driven priorities in Data Analytics Collaboration bodies to bring all silos together on all management levels

So when you come across some observations that do not fit the standard explanation, let your mind wander to see whether some radically different interpretation might do a better job. Perhaps you will think of something that will fit both the new data and the old data and thereby supplant the standard expla- nation. Toy with different perspectives. Look for the unusual. Try consciously to innovate. Train yourself to imagine new schemes and innovative ways to fit the pieces together. Seek the joy of discovery. Always test your new thoughts against the facts, of course, in rigorous, cold-blooded, unemotional scientific manner. But play the great game of the visionary and the innovator as well.

The iPod, I noted, disables its user by its very overcapacity; the glut of information generated by modern technology more largely threatens to make its receivers passive. Overload prompts disengagement. Seely Brown again makes a useful distinction in this regard between information and communication. An overwhelming volume of information, he suggests, is not an “innocent” problem; large amounts of raw data create a political fact: control becomes more centralized as volume increases. Whereas in communication, the volume of information decreases as people interact and interpret; editing and elimination are the procedures which decentralize communication.

The social difficulties experienced by patients with anorexia are not only caused by the patients’ deficits in interpreting others’ minds. There is evidence that they present an unemotional “flat” face to others (Lang et al. 2016), and this can lead to failed social encounters. This is reminiscent of babies’ extreme distress when their mothers presented an unmoving expression to them, just for a minute or two (Weinberg et al. 2008; Tronick 2018). In other words, we are all expecting emotional expression in others and find it very unpleasant when we meet someone who presents a flat, unemotional face. The dependency on confirmation from others corresponds with major trends in contemporary culture, with great emphasis on visuality, bodily surfaces, external qualities, performances, etc. A central psychological trait in both contemporary culture and highly aggravated in eating disorders is the emphasis on comparison and comparison anxiety . Many are obsessively comparing themselves with others, concerning bodies, numbers and amounts of food, hence depending on profoundly superficial data.

The work performed by the computer is specified by a program, which is written in a programming language. This language is converted to sequences of machine-language instructions by interpreters or compilers, via a predefined set of subroutines called the operating system. The instructions, which are stored in the memory of the computer, define the operations to be performed on data, which are also stored in the computer’s memory. A finite-state machine fetches and executes these instructions. The instructions as well as the data are represented by patterns of bits. Both the finite-state machine and the memory are built of storage registers and Boolean logic blocks, and the latter are based on simple logical functions, such as And, Or, and Invert. These logical functions are implemented by switches, which are set up either in series or in parallel, and these switches control a physical substance, such as water or electricity, which is used to send one of two possible signals from one switch to another: 1 or 0. This is the hierarchy of abstraction that makes computers work.

Let us review three cases from widely separated locations in the world. A Tungus shaman in Siberia agrees to the request of tribal hunters to locate game during a poor hunting season. Using a drumming technique, he enters an ASC and provides information to help his hunters. The Western interpretation—if it accepts at all the validity of this kind of information—would be that the shaman calculates the behavior of the game according to weather and well-known environmental conditions. In other words, his is information based on cognitive processing of sensory data. The explanation of the shaman himself is different: Guidance has been provided by forest spirits. On another continent, hunters of the Kalahari !Kung tribe leave the settlement to hunt for a period that may last anywhere from two days to two weeks. The tribe’s timely preparation for the return of successful hunters is necessary for processing the game. The people left behind make the appropriate steps long before the hunters’ reappearance. Their foreknowledge of the hunters’ return could be explained rationally by attributing it to a messenger sent ahead or the use of tam-tam drums or smoke signals. The tribesmen report, however, that it is the spirit of ancestors who informs them when the hunters will return. Next, we move to the Amazon basin. The Shuar shaman is facing a new disease in the community. An herbal remedy is sought by adding leaves of a candidate plant into the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, a sacrament indigenous to the Upper Amazon region. The shaman drinks it and, upon return to ordinary consciousness, decides the usefulness of the plant in question. Is his decision based on accumulation of ethnobotanical knowledge of several generations in combination with trial and error? The headhunter Shuar are not likely to be merciful to an ineffective medicine man, and his techniques must be working. As Luis Eduardo Luna explained to me, according to ayahuasqueros, the spirit of a new plant reveals itself with the help of the spirits associated with the ayahuasca. Sometimes, they also tell which plant to use next. We can point to the following contradiction: Healers from different cultures are unequivocal in their interpretation of the source of knowledge, whereas rational thinkers use diverging, unsystematic explanations. Which side should be slashed with Occam’s razor? Also called the “principle of parsimony,” Occam’s razor is usually interpreted to mean something like “Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily” or “Do not posit pluralities unnecessarily when generating explanatory models.” The principle of parsimony is used frequently by philosophers of science in an effort to establish criteria for choosing from theories with equal explanatory power. At first glance it is the “primitives” who multiply causes unnecessarily by referring to the supernatural. Yet Occam’s razor may be applied easily to the rational view, if those arguments are less parsimonious.

Such creatures were what they saw, because they now rigidly coded the neurons responsible for the sight. For humans too, the brain loses some of its unbounded intelligence whenever it perceives the universe across boundaries. That partial blindness remains inescapable without the ability to transcend. Impressions on our neurons are constantly being set for each of the senses, not just sight. Though we usually call the heavier impressions "stress," all impressions actually create some limitation. For illustrate: In the early 1980s, M.I.T. experts began studying how human hearing function. Hearing seems passive, but in fact every person listens quite selectively to the world and puts his own interpretation on the raw data that comes into his ears. (For example, a skilled singer hears pitch and harmony where a tone-deaf person hears noise.) One experiment involves people listening to fast, basic rhythms (1-2-3 and 1-2-3 and 1-2-3), and teaching them to hear the rhythm differently (1, 2, 3-and-l, 2, 3-and-l, 2). After the noises started to be interpreted distinctly, the participants indicated that the sounds became more vibrant and fresher. The experiment evidently had taught people to change their unseen limits somewhat. The really interesting result, however, was that when they went home these people found the colours seemed lighter, music sounded better, the taste of food immediately became more pleasant, and everyone around them seemed lovable. Just the slightest consciousness opening induced a change in reality. Meditation causes a bigger shift because it opens more channels of awareness and opens them to a deeper level. The shift does not separate us from the normal way we use our consciousness. Building borders will continue to be a fact of life. The twist provided by the rishis was to infuse this behavior with liberation, increasing it to a level which transcends the alienated ego's petty thoughts and desires. The ego typically has no choice but to actively waste life erecting one wall after another.

Your automatic mechanism, or what the Freudians call the “unconscious,” is absolutely impersonal. It operates as a machine and has no “will” of its own. It always tries to react appropriately to your current beliefs and interpretations concerning environment. It always seeks to give you appropriate feelings, and to accomplish the goals that you consciously determine. It works only on the data that you feed it in the form of ideas, beliefs, interpretations, opinions. It is conscious thinking that is the “control knob” of your unconscious machine. It was by conscious thought, though perhaps irrational and unrealistic, that the unconscious machine developed its negative and inappropriate reaction patterns, and it is by conscious rational thought that the automatic reaction patterns can be changed.

Some of the words stored in the memory represent data to be operated upon, like numbers and letters. Others represent instructions that tell the machine what sequence of operations to perform. The instructions are stored in machine language, which, as noted, is much simpler than a typical programming language. Machine language is interpreted directly by the finite-state machine. In the type of computer we will describe, each instruction in machine language is stored in a single word of memory, and a sequence of instructions is stored in a block of sequentially numbered memory locations.

the tendency among the ‘woke’ to disregard data if they do not corroborate their existing views, and to interpret all forms of inequality of outcome as evidence of systemic oppression.

Lu finished breakfast, sat sipping coffee. Her eyes wandered about the room, half-consciously memorizing faces, displays, exits. The people in this brightly lit, quiet, air-conditioned bunker were living in a fantasy world. And none of them knew it. This was the end receptacle for megabytes of intelligence streaming in to the Peace from all over the world. Before that data arrived, it was already interpreted and winnowed by remote processors. Here it was finally integrated and put on the displays for the highest commanders to pass upon. These people thought their cute displays gave them some ultimate grip on reality. Lu knew that had never been true—and after last night she was sure the system was riddled with lies.

On a mental level, our brains are always seeking reinforcement for our subconscious beliefs. When we believe that we are not worthy of something, our brains go out of their way to find evidence for us that this is true. What this can look like is situation after situation coming up in our lives that we interpret as more and more data supporting that we are not worthy of whatever thing it is we want.

Scientists are really good at finding flaws in studies that contradict their own views, but it sometimes happens that evidence accumulates across many studies to the point where scientists must change their minds. I’ve seen this happen in my colleagues (and myself) many times,34 and it’s part of the accountability system of science—you’d look foolish clinging to discredited theories. But for nonscientists, there is no such thing as a study you must believe. It’s always possible to question the methods, find an alternative interpretation of the data, or, if all else fails, question the honesty or ideology of the researchers.

Learning about other interpretations of Christianity and the Bible can also be quite the revelation. Reading about the Gnostics was an eye-opener for me personally — the idea of a very different group of early Christians with more personal and feminine views on Christianity. They were wiped out by the increasingly political force of the dominant church group (Pagels 1979). In modern times, there has been a rediscovery of the Gnostics and also the ancient goddess religions. Importantly, more data about the history of Christianity and the Bible itself can be very enlightening. A good starting point for some of this critical information is the impressive collection of essays in The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You to Read (Leedom, 1993).

That person values the differences because those differences add to his knowledge, to his understanding of reality. When we're left to our own experiences, we constantly suffer from a shortage of data. Is it logical that two people can disagree and both can be right? It's not logical: it's psychological. And it's very real. You see the young lady; I see the old woman. We're both looking at the same picture, and both of us are right. We see the same black lines, the same white spaces. But we interpret them differently because we've been conditioned to interpret them differently. And unless we value the differences in our perceptions, unless we value each other and give credence to the possibility that we're both right. . .we will never be able to transcend the limits of that conditioning. . .I value you. I value your perception. I want to understand.