Big Data: Big Challenges, Big Opportunities. The Reification of Consilience
Keynote address by Daniel Reed, Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, the University of Utah
2019
Each individual’s Weltanschauung is shaped by the totality of their life experiences and it defines their perspectives, philosophy, and understanding of the cultural, economic, and scientific milieu. (The phrase “world view,” the nearest English equivalent, seems rather prosaic by comparison.) Each perspective is necessarily constrained, bringing biases, both explicit and implicit. If in doubt, spend a bit of time looking at a simple doorway—any example will do—and think about what you truly see.
Beyond the superficial, a humble doorway, like many human objects, embodies large fractions of our culture, history, and innovation: protection and the rule of law; security, privacy and mathematics (locks); metallurgy and materials science; environmental systems and fluid dynamics; trade and economic specialization; manufacturing and replication; microbiology and cellular structure (wood); human social dynamics and structures; art, design and esthetics; paint, chemistry and polymers; and mechanical advantage and physics, to name just a view. On any cursory examination, each of us typically sees but a few of these things, lost in the minutiae of daily life, but they remain there to see despite our obliviousness.
The explosive growth of knowledge has had similar, deleterious effects on our ability to see the integrative whole. Intellectual consilience is increasingly obscured by increasing specialization and the seeming triumph of reductionism over holistic perspective. Is there any academic anywhere who has not heard or repeated the old joke, “You learn more and more about less and less, until you know everything about nothing, then they give you a Ph.D.?” (See Simplifying Communication and Shaping the Message, Using the Medium.)
Humor aside, the original seven liberal arts, the Trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), have given way to the repeated speciation of disciplines, each with their own arcane argot, incomprehensible to all but the speciated initiate. Yet the three big and enduring questions about matter and the universe,
life and its processes, and the human condition are deeply intertwined. How did it all begin? How does it work? How will it end? What does it mean? Philosophy, ethics, mathematics, the physical and biological sciences are all elements of our doorway, Plato’s Cave manifest in new
ways. (See Eudora, You Got the Love?)
As academics, we ardently seek to be the embodiment of Raphael’s Causarum Cognitio (The School of Athens) when disciplinary isolation means Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel may often be more apt. The concomitant loss of a lingua franca, an ontology of shared discourse, and a deep and binding epistemology of knowledge endanger our ability and our deep need for convergent conversation and reflection. CRISPR and gene editing, climate change and the Anthropocene, technological revolutions, and socioeconomic disruption all cry out for disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary collaboration and shared insights. Across this cacophony, the emergence of big data and machine learning is a potential Diogenean lantern, illuminating a mechanism to reunify divergent domains in holistic ways, an enabler for collaborative Renaissance teams. (See Renaissance Teams: Reifying the School at Athens.)
Etc....