The moon landing, the internet, the ability to sequence the human genome

but it also taps into a lot of humans’ fear

and about thirty years ago, the cultural critic Neil Postman wrote a book call the amusing ourselves to death

Which lay this out really brilliantly

And here’s what he said comparing the dystopian visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley

He said ‘Orwell fear that we will become a captive culture; Huxley fear that we would become a trivial culture.’

Orwell fear the truth would be conceal from us and Huxley fear we would be drown in the sea of irrelevance.

In a nut shell, it’s a choice between big brother watching you and you watching big brother.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, we are not passive consumer of data and technology.

We shape the role it place in our life and the way we made meaning from it.

But to do that, we have to pay as much attention to how we think as how we code

We have to ask question and hard question to move pass counting things to understanding them

We’re constantly bombarded with stories about how much data there is in the world

But when it comes to big data, and the challenge is interpreting it

Size isn’t everything.

There’s also the speed of which it moves

And the many variety of data types

And here are just the few examples, Images

Texts

Video

Audio

And what unites these despair it types of data

Is that they are created by people

And they require context

Now, there’s a group of data scientists at the university of Illinos at Chicago

And they are called the Health Media collaboratory.

And they have been working with the center for disease control

To better understand, how people talk about quitting smoking

How they talk about electronic cigarets.

And what they can do collectively to help them quit.

The interesting thing is if you wanna understand how people talk about smoking

First you have to understand what they mean, when they say smoking

And on Tweeter, they are four main categories.

First one, smoking cigarets.

Number two, smoking marijuana.

Number three, smoking ribs.

And number four, smoking hot women

So…then you have to think about what have the people talk about electronic cigarets?

And there are so many different ways that people do this

You can see from the slide.

It’s a complex kind of queery.

And what that reminds us is that

Languages created by people.

And people are messy and were complex and we use metaphors and slang and jargon

And we do this twenty-four seven and many many languages.

And then as soon as we figure it out, we change it up.

So…did this ads that cdcs put on these television ads that feature a woman with a hole in her throat

And that were very graphic and very disturbing

Did they actually have an impact on whether people quit?

And helpfully, the collaboratory respect the limits of their data

But they were able to conclude that those advertisements and you may have seen them

They have the affect of jotting people into a thought process.

That may have an impact on future behavior.

And…what I admire, and appreciate about this project design from the fact, including the fact

That’s base on real human need is that

It’s a fantastic example of courage and the face of the sea of relevance.

And so…it’s not just big data that causes challenge and interpretation.

Because let’s face it. We human-beings have a very rich stream of taking any among of data

No matter how small and screwing it up.

So…many years ago you may remember

That formal president Ronald Reagan was very criticize for making a statement the facts are stupid things

And it was a slip of the tongue. Let’s be fair.

He actually meant to quote John Adams’ defense British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trial

That facts are stubborn things.

But I actually think there’s a bit of accidental wisdom in what he said.

Because facts are stubborning things.

But sometimes they are stupid too.

When I tell you a personal story about why this matters a lot to me

I need to take a breath.

My son Isaac when he was two, he is diagnose with autism.

And he was happy, hilarious, loving and affectionate little guy.

but the metrics on his developmental evaluations, which looked at things like the number of words — at that point, none

Communicate with gestures and minimum eye contact put his developmental level at that of a nine months old baby.

And the diagnosis fact is actually correct but it didn’t tell the whole story.

And about a year and a half later, he was almost four.

I found him in front of the computer one day.

Running a google search on woman

Spell w-i-m-e-m

And I did what any you know…upset parents will do

just immediate started hitting the back bottom to see what else he has been searching for

And they were in order men, school, bus and computer (cpyutr)

And I was stunned.

Because we didn’t know that he could spell much less read

So I ask him. Isaac, how do you do this?

And he looked at me very seriously and said ‘type in the box’

He was teaching himself to communicate.

But we were looking at the wrong place.

And this is what happens when assessment and analytics over value one matrix in this case verbal communication

And undervalue others’ such as creating problem solving.

Communication was hard for Isaac.

And so he found a work around to find out what he needed to know.

And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.

Because forming a question is really complex process.

But he can get himself a lot of way there. By putting a word in the search box.

And so this little moment had a really profound impact on me.

In our family. Because it helps us change our reference for what’s going on for him.

And worry of a little bit less and appreciate his resource more.

Facts are stupid things.

And they’re vulnerable to misuse willful or otherwise.

I have a friend - Emily Willingham who’s a scientist.

And she wrote a piece for forbes not long ago.

Entitled the ten weirdest things ever linked to autism.

It’s quite a list.

The internet link for everything, right?

And of course mother. Because an actually way, there’s more others the whole bunch in the mother category here.

And you can see, it’s a pretty rich and interesting list.

I’m a big fan of you know…being pregnant in a free way, personally.

The final one is interesting because the term of ‘refrigerator’ mother was actually the original hypothesis for the cause of autism.

And that meant somebody was cold and unloving.

And at this point, you might be thinking…okay…Susan we get it.

You can take data. You can make it mean anything and this is true.

It’s absolutely true.

But the challenge is that

We have this opportunity to try make meaning out of ourselves.

Because frankly, data doesn’t create meaning, we do.

So as business people, as consumers, as patients, as citizens

We have our responsibility, I think.

To spend more time focus on our critical thinking skills.

Why?

Because at this point in our history as we heard, many times over we can process Exabyte in lightening speed.

And we have potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently and far greater impact than we did in the past.

Great, right?

And so what we need to do instead is spend a little bit more time on things like the humanities.

And sociology, and the social sciences, rhetoric, philosophy, ethics.

Because it gives us context that is so important for big data.

Because they help us become better critical thinkers.

Because after all, if I can spot a problem in an argument, it doesn’t much matter whether it’s express in words or numbers

And this means, teaching ourselves.

To find those conformation by thesis and false correlations.

And being able to spot a naked emotional appeal from thirty yards.

Because something that happens after something doesn’t mean it happen because of it necessarily.

And if you let me geek out on your first second, the Romans call this ‘post hoc ergo propterhoc’

After which therefore because of which.

And it means questioning disciplines like demographics

Why? Because they're based on assumptions about who we all are based on our gender

and our age and where we live as opposed to data on what we actually think and do

And since we have this data

we need to treat it with appropriate privacy controls and consumer opt-in

and beyond that, we need to be clear about our hypotheses,

the methodologies that we use, and our confidence in the result

As my high school algebra teacher used to say

show your math, because if I don't know what steps you took

I don't know what steps you didn't take

and if I don't know what questions you asked, I don't know what questions you didn't ask

And it means asking ourselves, really, the hardest question of all

Did the data really show us this, or does the result make us feel more successful and more comfortable?

So the Health Media Collaboratory, at the end of their project

they were able to find that 87 percent of tweets about those very graphic and disturbing anti-smoking ads expressed fear

but did they conclude that they actually made people stop smoking?

No. It's science, not magic.

So if we are to unlock the power of data

We don't have to go blindly into Orwell's vision of a totalitarian future

or Huxley's vision of a trivial one, or some horrible cocktail of both.

What we have to do is treat critical thinking with respect and be inspired by examples like the Health Media Collaboratory

and as they say in the superhero movies, let's use our powers for good.

Thank you.