Data addiction is a huge and cascading problem as data increasingly moves toward infinity. Data is valuable, but its value is overestimated. The right data, applied appropriately is useful, but contrary to the prevailing wisdom, having more data doesn’t necessarily lead to better outcomes.
At the same time, it is hard to be the person arguing against capturing and acquiring more data.
Data doesn’t always provide the right answer. It doesn’t account for luck or any kind of innovation.
Data only represents a small subset of reality. More data might fill in more blanks and complete a picture, but it can never be the full picture.
The full picture has so many details
Just as things can be infinitely small and infinitely big, the same is true of data. Data can be collected and continuously broken down into smaller parts.
There are many dangerous ways that we feed into data addiction. Some of it even seems completely harmless like sharing more data about your preferences at a hotel chain, so that the next time you check in at the chain, they know about everything that you want.
The desire to know everything possible seems deeply ingrained in humans. Seeing the ads from IBM while watching Wimbledon only reinforced the love of data. The amount of data that is collected from a tennis match is incredible, but I wonder if it is truly more insightful than an experienced experienced tennis coach.
In general, data is about probability. It is not the answer. There are many probabilities in play at the same time and it is extremely hard to factor in all of the probabilities at once.
