The Imperial Origins of Big Data | Hacker News Reader

The Imperial Origins of Big Data

yalebooks.yale.edu

20 pointsdrdee7 comments

The earliest surviving written records - the clay tablets of ancient Mesopotamia - are mostly collections of data, taxation records and so on. It was something of a disappointment to scholars when cuneiform was deciphered that their materials didn't record many epic poems, but rather a whole lot of internal revenue information. It's a fascinating story, well told by Irving Finkel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfYYraMgiBA

The vast majority of data being collection today is similarly uninteresting - maybe the surveillance state likes it as a means to control politicians by threatening to expose their porn watching habits or similar, and certainly targeted advertising has made some people wealthy, but it's not even well-curated, and it's certainly not the kind of valuable data that comes out of well-designed and controlled experiments, and thus 'big data science' is one of the most over-hyped fields in existence today.

Since the 90’s there had been a trend towards using administrative data (e.g. POS data, tax records, customs data) over survey data for measuring things like the CPI, GDP and production statistics because it’s far cheaper, much more comprehensive, and sometimes more accurate. It’s not all used for advertising and mass surveillance.

Those scholars are rather stupid in my opinion. Taxation records provide far more valuable information about a society than one of their poems.

Mesopotamia in particular is so strange. It feels like we don't understand them. Not nearly as well as many other ancient peoples are understood. Their religion was obviously terribly complicated but so little of it makes sense to the modern person. All of the references in their literature are self-references, but since like 99% of everything is lost (even though Mesopotamia is probably the most well-documented ancient civilization) most it makes little sense, even to the experts, for lack of context. (The way that cuneiform tablets fragment heightens that effect.)

The result is sort of paradoxical. We know more about certain aspects of Mesopotamian life 4000 years ago - particularly their economy and their own internal history - than we know about some much more recent societies. But many Assyriologists I imagine would sacrifice a great deal of barley records for a single chapter from Mesopotamia that's more like either Lucretius or Herodotus, for example, with some insight into how they understood things like metaphysics or politics.

Not if it's this kind of poetry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh

also where the word "statistics" comes from:

> The term statistics is ultimately derived from the Neo-Latin statisticum collegium ("council of state") and the Italian word statista ("statesman" or "politician"). The German Statistik, first introduced by Gottfried Achenwall (1749), originally designated the analysis of data about the state, signifying the "science of state" (then called political arithmetic in English).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics#Etymolog...

Ralph Van Deman in 1901-1903 in the Philiphines-American War, compiling huge files on the population to try to root out rebels, was imo one of the first big data people.

He brought that home to America. And started keeping copious notes on anything the capitalist fatcats dubbed un-American. His labor, leftist, civil rights suppression activities got entrenched as quasi-legal vigilantism & endless paperwork & survelliance as the American Protection League. He was an O.G. keeper of big data.

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