Robert McNamara is remembered as JFK’s and LBJ’s secretary of defense, who was a primary motivator in escalating the Vietnam War. What is less known about McNamara–as discussed in this recent MIT Technology Review article– is that he was obsessed with accumulating data for any objective that he undertook. While ordinarily we would think this is a good thing for making informed decisions, this article discusses the limitations on the usefulness and reliability of data, and the lessons this has for modern day’s Big Data, with particular attention to Google.
Read more here:The Dictatorship of Data
Photo courtesy of Neerav Bhatt