Seek patterns first, then data
I was having a discussion with one academic about the necessary bias that is introduced when an expert interprets material, as against allowing the people who provided the material to self interpret.
…instead of saying “The Iranian Government believes X and is motivated by Y”, which is at best a crude generalization, we can now show that there are different types of stabilities and instabilities by looking at the material from multiple perspectives.
Moreover we can do it through visualization, without expert intermediation which has the potential to improve decision making. To many leaders in government and industry alike are isolated by reality by their advisors. Don’t get me wrong, advisors and experts are necessary, but decision makers also need to be able to go from seeing the pattern as a whole, to the low level source data in short time-scales without disinter-mediation.
This approach…is about not looking at the raw data until we have first seen a pattern in the metadata. When people look at raw data, they see it from the context of a specific perspective; when they look at the wider pattern then they gain perspective and appreciation of opportunities not previously present.
We naturally filter out anomalies when we look at data. If it doesn’t fit the patterns of our expectation it will be ignored.
…we do not attempt to interpret the data, but to sense patterns in the metadata. Only then can we risk looking at the data itself, to do so earlier would be to risk pattern entrainment. By looking at landscape shifts over time we can sense subtle patterns that would escape a traditional analytical approach.
