Five dashboards
There are many, many problems raised by the modern cult of "data". [1] Here I deal only with the more superficial yet already paradoxical, that is, the frequency with which they are invoked in support of their arguments tends to increase in inverse reason of their knowledge and / or the rigor with which they are considered. That those who flaunt them at every push is often the first to wipe, let's say, their nose. The phenomenon is lately so precise as to give rise to the suspicion, at least in the writer, that it is not just a dialectical malpractice, but rather a grave confirmation of the cognitive distortions mentioned in the note.
Since I too am modern I invite myself , in order not to fall into this fallacy, I have prepared a tool for representing "the data" for my use. These are two dashboards or dashboards that elaborate in almost real time as many numerical series on the disease that is thrilling the world. In the first I propose some extracts from the database of the Our World in Data (OWID) project of the University of Oxford; in the second, from the one released by our National Institute of Health (ISS); in the third I carry out some international comparisons on the specific issue of vaccinations; in the fourth I superimpose the epidemiological data in 2020 and 2021 to test the effect of the vaccination campaigns started in the meantime; in the fifth I present the data on vaccinations in Italy using different interrogation criteria.
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Eg. cognitive (to what extent can the quantity of information be extended by flattening its complexity, without invalidating it?), empirical (can collective information precede and condition individual experience?); epistemic (how much is information that cannot be verified?); politicians (who decides which data they will "decide" instead of the decision makers?); psychological (how healthy is it to reflect on phenomena that cannot be controlled?); ethical and civil (does the fixation on depersonalized and remote references affect the respect of people close to them?) etc. ↩
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/due-cruscotti on Wed, 14 Jul 2021 07:32:27 PDT.