I’m reminded of the people who want to preserve card catalogs. These catalogs are a system that contains data, and yet they seem to have accumulated details over the years that are important enough to some people to preserve.
On the other hand, I deliberately avoid watching political speeches, preferring the transcript, partly because I don’t want to be unduly influenced by the delivery of the speech. Detachment is sometimes an aesthetic choice.
Yes, that's a good point. The worrying thing is when the detail is *irrecoverably destroyed*, because there might be a new method of analysis later that captures a distinction you don't know about. But in terms of analyzing something in the here and now, you're always going to be looking at some subset of the thing anyway, and it can often be wise to be even more deliberate in what parts you shut out. You can be very restrictive with your lenses, as long as you remember that what you see at any given time isn't all there is.
This probably clashes heavily with your (apparent) metaphysical commitments, but René Guénon's The Reign of Quantity and Signs of the Times is a scathing indictment of this very problem: the attempt by moderns to reduce quality (what you call detail) to quantity.
I’m reminded of the people who want to preserve card catalogs. These catalogs are a system that contains data, and yet they seem to have accumulated details over the years that are important enough to some people to preserve.
On the other hand, I deliberately avoid watching political speeches, preferring the transcript, partly because I don’t want to be unduly influenced by the delivery of the speech. Detachment is sometimes an aesthetic choice.
Yes, that's a good point. The worrying thing is when the detail is *irrecoverably destroyed*, because there might be a new method of analysis later that captures a distinction you don't know about. But in terms of analyzing something in the here and now, you're always going to be looking at some subset of the thing anyway, and it can often be wise to be even more deliberate in what parts you shut out. You can be very restrictive with your lenses, as long as you remember that what you see at any given time isn't all there is.
Does data science applied to marketing destroy the thing and replace it with its ashes at the same level?
This probably clashes heavily with your (apparent) metaphysical commitments, but René Guénon's The Reign of Quantity and Signs of the Times is a scathing indictment of this very problem: the attempt by moderns to reduce quality (what you call detail) to quantity.