Editing Talk:2582: Data Trap

Jump to: navigation, search
Ambox notice.png Please sign your posts with ~~~~

Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.

The edit can be undone. Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision Your text
Line 4: Line 4:
 
:But the feeling I get is that Data begets data (by analysis of the original data) and then the data that is the analysis plus the original data begs to in turn be meta-analysed. Which then gives an additional clump of data... Trapping everyone in a potential N-meta-analysis loop.
 
:But the feeling I get is that Data begets data (by analysis of the original data) and then the data that is the analysis plus the original data begs to in turn be meta-analysed. Which then gives an additional clump of data... Trapping everyone in a potential N-meta-analysis loop.
 
:(For those wondering how the entropy of this system works, it's the additional state info of the successive analysers, like the sunlight shone onto the biosphere, that prevents the system going 'stale' and degrading to successively shorter summaries that add nothing. You get to comment upon the prior analysis's choice of trend metric, etc...)
 
:(For those wondering how the entropy of this system works, it's the additional state info of the successive analysers, like the sunlight shone onto the biosphere, that prevents the system going 'stale' and degrading to successively shorter summaries that add nothing. You get to comment upon the prior analysis's choice of trend metric, etc...)
 
 
:Well, that's my take, but I wouldn't know how to authoritatively - and succinctly - put that into the explanation. I could be entirely wrong, as well. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.173|172.70.90.173]] 09:34, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
 
:Well, that's my take, but I wouldn't know how to authoritatively - and succinctly - put that into the explanation. I could be entirely wrong, as well. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.90.173|172.70.90.173]] 09:34, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
 
::You're on to something - it's about information vs data. Cueball wants to analyse the data to get hold of information that's buried somewhere in it. Usually, in terms of bits, that information is only a tiny fraction compared to the volume of data. Think of gigabytes of data giving rise to an insightful scientific publication that's only a few tens of kilobytes long. Megan seems to think that this is just a few more kB of "data" to be added to the pile, without realising that we've just gone from a jumble of confused bits to actual understanding. Of course, in doing his analysis, Cueball has added some information of his own, to wit an explanation of how he did the analysis and (implicitly) why he chose that tack. Which would make the new pile of data ripe for meta-analysis as you say.[[Special:Contributions/162.158.233.105|162.158.233.105]] 10:27, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
 
  
 
Megan is NOT "Thinking Cueball implies he wants to get rid of some of the data . . . ."! I have NO idea where that implication lies. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.153|172.70.130.153]] 10:16, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
 
Megan is NOT "Thinking Cueball implies he wants to get rid of some of the data . . . ."! I have NO idea where that implication lies. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.130.153|172.70.130.153]] 10:16, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
 
Done properly, analysis actually reduces the amount of information (not data) that you need to consider--that's the whole point. Rather than trying to comprehend thousands or millions of numbers, you can (for instance) reduce it to an average, or a correlation, or some other single number. Megan is missing the whole point of analyzing data. [[User:Nitpicking|Nitpicking]] ([[User talk:Nitpicking|talk]]) 12:49, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
 
:I think the comic is deliberately ignoring the fact that once you analyze the data, you don't have to think much about the original data. So this reduced information is added to the original information, and data just accumulates without bound. And even when you do stop considering the original data, it's not usually discarded, you keep it in case someone wants to verify your analysis, you want to analyze it in different ways, or combine it with new raw data. Excess data could actually have been a problem in the old days when it was stored on paper -- electronic storage his mitigated this; a single PC can now hold data than one would have needed warehouses in the past. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 15:15, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
 
 
I fleshed out the explanation, adding explanation for the reason for data analysis and the apparent data equilibrium that's being implied. Thanks also to [[User:Kynde|Kynde]] for adding some more clarification in that new section. [[User:KirbyDude25|KirbyDude25]] ([[User talk:KirbyDude25|talk]]) 13:40, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
 
 
Pretty sure this comic is another example of literalist perversion of the title. There are many things called Data Traps, but they tend to fall into two categories: Collection of data (digital, physical, benign, etc) where data is being accumulated for retrieval/use, and "gotcha's", ie possible mistakes in collecting, handling, or processing  of data). The comic seems to be a play on the intersection of the two [[Special:Contributions/108.162.246.62|108.162.246.62]] 19:56, 17 February 2022 (UTC)
 
 
Similar to https://xkcd.com/2086/ imo.
 
[[Special:Contributions/172.70.35.70|172.70.35.70]] 00:28, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
 
 
This reminds me of "The sixth sally, or how Trurl and Klapaucius created a demon of the second kind to defeat the pirate Pugg" from Stanisław Lem's Cyberiad (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad). Protagonists got caught by an information collecting pirate Pugg and escaped after providing him access to all existing information, which stunned the pirate. [[User:Tkopec|Tkopec]] ([[User talk:Tkopec|talk]]) 11:43, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
 
:Oh yeah! That's funny, I read that book a few months ago. [[Special:Contributions/172.70.38.69|172.70.38.69]] 15:37, 18 February 2022 (UTC)
 

Please note that all contributions to explain xkcd may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see explain xkcd:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:

Cancel | Editing help (opens in new window)