The Dependency Principle

I’m taking a week’s break from consideration of Popper’s work. It seems timely to mention one of the differences between science and information analysis – in general analysts don’t do their own experiments (i.e. generate their own data), while scientists who work directly with experimental data in general do.

Information analysts tend to have their data handed to them. Sometimes from a different department in their organisation, sometimes from entirely outside. Let’s pretend for now that that is the only difference between the role of experiment in the work of analysts and scientists (reserving an exploration of the others for a later post). The consequences that the analyst lacks an overview of the quality, completeness, and coding of the data.

Let’s briefly look at a sketch of the analytical process after the data is received:

Firstly there is (hopefully!) some sort of data checking, cleaning and familiarisation.

After that we might do some pre-processing of the data to turn it from raw data into something that encodes a bit more meaning (for instance turning counts into rates, or grosses into nets).

Then we could get clever with some sophisticated multi-variate analysis, GIS, data-mining or somesuch.

After that we can maybe draw some conclusions, bounce our results off other people’s work. We could bring in causality and the Reverend Bayes and start feeling pretty impressed with ourselves.

But look down… we’re standing on the fifth step of a five step structure, and the foundation was outside our control.

The name of this post draws an analogy between the structure above and a concept introduced by Iain Banks in his novel Excession. This is an unashamed but entertainingly modern space opera which has as it’s most engaging protagonists a bunch of artificially intelligences – minds – and the spacecraft that effectively make up their bodies. As superhuman intelligences they are frustrated with the slow (to them) action in the real world and pace of human affairs. They spend their leisure time in self-created artificial universes beyond the ken of man. But look down…

“... if you spent all your time having Fun, with no way back to reality, or just no idea what to do to protect yourself when you did get back there, then you were vulnerable. In fact, you were probably dead... it didn't matter that base reality was of no consequence aesthetically, hedonistically, metamathically, intellectually and philosophically; if that was the foundation stone that all your higher-level comfort and joy rested on, and it was kicked away from underneath you, you fell, and your limitless pleasure realms fell with you.” - Iain Banks, Excession

You are completely reliant on your data collection methods and lowly paid data gathering staff, no matter how clever you are or how advanced your analytical techniques. That’s The Dependency Principle.