Big data, Google and the end of free will

Given huge sets, much like reality, almost anything can be "proven" at some sort of local scale. It's not a religion or a cult or a new god. It's just observation.

Second, data is a recording of past events, and has surprisingly limited ability to predict future outcomes. There is a narrow window for the most instinctual tasks where it works well and there is a Tom of value there -- but it comes no where close enough to be meta-cognitions ability to give you free will.

Harari complains that "Dataism" (and email) makes us "... tiny chips inside a giant system that nobody really understands". But individuals always were just small parts of a great ecosystem that nobody understands.

But even with SMTP, we are still big enough to live our lives well for ourselves and loved ones. We can also try to improve society -- but the results will be small and unpredictable.

He shows the same confusion of indivdual freedom with social control when he says:

> in a humanist society, ethical and political debates are conducted in the name of conflicting human feelings,

Well that's a pity, because in a liberal society, they should be debates about human rights. Your feelings about gay pride or religion should not give you authority to control others, but your rights might set some bounds.

As far as I can tell, Harari has learned that modern biology is starting to see life and the mind as an information system. He accepts this science, but doesn't like it. So he tries to build some confused link to the Big Data giants.

Now there a good reasons, well known at HN, to disaprove of those guys. But Harari's reasoning is not even wrong.

*: e.g. The RC church emphasises individual free will, claims its own temporal authority, and teaches that God is the ultimate moral authority.

Sure - there are current limitations, and being able to predict what hasn't happened yet is certainly difficult.

What was interesting to me though, is many of our most important choices in life have happened 1000s of times before. Should I buy this? Should I marry this person? What school should I go to or what career should I pursue? These are all questions that can, on average, be better answered with available data than potentially just following your gut. This is the position of the article, and I tend to agree.

While the mystical nature of the totality of the machine we are cogs in seems hyperbolic or unnerving, at a practical level it makes sense to model your interactions with the world that way. Taking that stance, the comparison to religion and humanism should be easy to follow, and reflect on. When are you "dataist"? When are you "humanist?" You'll learn a lot about yourself simply asking that question.

Which makes for a great ending to the article - do you know yourself? Better than algorithm? Maybe not in all cases, and the data shows thats not necessarily a bad thing.

You can't answer, because the candidate algorithms are trade secrets, "under active development" or can only be run when babysit by trained specialists? Then it's just a giant "Computer says no" where the implicit assumptions and biases of a relatively small group of humans sold as "objecive" or even "superhuman" by putting some layers of indirection between them and the public.

I believe the next metaphor will be ecology. The notion that an information processing agent can be understood in isolation from the ecology in which it operates (both in terms of energy/mechanics and information) is getting harder and harder to sustain. And the ecologies we humans rely on are dying quickly. We'll need to turn that around sooner or later, by insight or by force.

However. It is an important read, in my opinion.

Because this is well rendered and well formatted summation of the rhetoric people use to argue against scaled analytics and the collection of data. Understanding the counter arguments and motivation behind this article is a good step to interfacing with people uncomfortable with these ideas.

I'm just reading a book by Norbert Elias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Elias), who, when writing about his theory of the "civilizing process", stated exactly the contrary. More exactly, he's saying that we only listened to our hearts/true self/passions back when we were "un-civilized", like in the Middle Ages, but after the State monopolized the use of force and the collecting of taxes and after the "société de cour" formed people had to suppress their passions/heart and had to "rationalize" their external actions.