The Infinite Dimension of Truth - According to Taoist Philosophy

 

"If the truth can be fully described by language, then this is not the truth" (1)

This is the first sentence of the most important Taoist text and in my opinion often overlooked.

In this world, the truth has infinite dimension. And if we try to model the truth by language, we are bound to miss something. Analogously, describing the truth is similar to projecting onto a multi-dimensional plane, e.g.

Truth = ∑ß¡x¡ + ε

where x¡ can be different words or topics. You will always get an error term ε. And hence:

"If you observe without any perspective, then you can see the fullness; if you come with a perspective, then you only see what you come to see"  (2)

... which feels particularly true in today's society. Search engine and social media platform are even strengthening our innate human behaviour. They deliver news feed and search results that you like to click! 

What does that mean to a data scientist and even more generally as a person then?

• Active open-mindedness: always curious to seek out the other sides of a story. Be ready to update and change your model.
• Accept that we do not always have an answer. ε can be very large - it is what it is. Running a few more regressions will likely give you a false positive and over-fitting.
• Observe the fullness without a perspective (3). Always get your hand dirty to understand the data and think hard about how data is generated.

#taoist #statistics #perspective #socialmedia #surveillancecapitalism

 (1) "道可道，非常道" - 道德经. This Taoist text is written in classical Chinese and is very hard to comprehend. With that in mind, the above is my own humble translation. To quote Wiki,  "...the written language has no active or passive, no singular or plural, no case, no person, no tense, no mood. Moreover, the received text lacks many grammatical particles..."

(2) "故常无欲，以观其妙；常有欲，以观其徼" - 道德经  

(3) "应无所住而生其心" - 金刚经