ALL MEASUREMENTS CONSIST OF TESTIMONY OF THE PERSONS RECORDING AND REPORTING THE

ALL MEASUREMENTS CONSIST OF TESTIMONY OF THE PERSONS RECORDING AND REPORTING THE MEASUREMENT

(Edited)

—“All the data we collect is true, right? Nobody lies about their weight, or their age. No salespeople have ever exaggerated their figures. No manager ever covered their ass with selective reporting. No teacher has ever fudged some grades. No scientist has ever fabricated data. Surely, the data is just data. It exists. This is wrong. Data does not have some kind of independent existence. It is always asserted by some agent (a device, sensor, person, or process). But if you separate that data value from its provenance – if you treat it as a kind of truth, instead of as a story told by a particular device, then what do you do when you discover the calibration is off and it has been over-reporting the temperature? To divorce data from its provenance and behave like it is an existential /ontological entity, is a fundamental misclassification.”—

Actually it’s just lying. A nasty common habit. By which we seek to avoid blame.