“The microscope showed us there is more to a drop of pond water than we think we see. The telescope showed us there is more to the night sky than we think we see. And new, digital data now shows us there is more to human society than we think we see”
[Everybody lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz]
Sometimes we see others’ incomprehensible behaviors and realize that individual human behaviors are too complex, complicated, and random to understand. However, group behavior (instead of individual behaviors) often has an intrinsic and typical pattern. That is, group behavior is not just the sum of individual behaviors.
Data science is spotting these patterns and extracting dominant factors to make these patterns from Big Data, which enable us to clearly understand our society. While a telescope or microscope shows us more detailed observations, the intrinsicscope shows us a more coarse-grained insight to better understand a complex system in our society.
Everybody makes DATA 