Believing in big data is equivalent to believing in the stars

Look up at the sky on a clear night. This is not an astrological game. (Indeed, the experiment’s more impressive if you don’t know one zodiacal pattern from another and rely solely on your wits.) In a matter of seconds you will find patterns among the stars. We can pretty much apprehend up to five objects (pennies, points of light, what-have-you) at a single glance. Totting up more than five objects, however, takes work: it means looking for groups, lines, patterns, symmetries, boundaries.

The ancients cut up the sky into figures, all those aeons ago, for the same reason we each cut up the sky within moments of gazing at it — because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to comprehend the sky at all. Our pattern-finding ability can get out of hand. During his Nobel lecture in 1973 the zoologist Konrad Lorenz recalled how he once ‘mistook a mill for a sternwheel steamer.