Sacrificing knowledge in the name of data

The goal is not more data, but data to facilitate the story of what we're trying to achieve.

We're drowning in data. From countless dashboards and spreadsheets to real-time analytics, we're told that more data means better decisions. But anyone who's faced an onslaught of metrics knows the truth: more data often leads to more confusion.

This is where AI enters the picture.

Thriving on massive amounts of data, AI tickles our instincts, pushing us to focus on fueling the 'data beast,' telling us: "It's OK, hoard your data, I'll make it all magically great."

We get distracted, pile the data, forget our story.

If you need convincing, the data–information–knowledge–wisdom (DIKW pyramid) model makes it clear: knowledge emerges only following meaning, context, and use are applied to data and information.

That’s the leverage point to optimize for: data to enable knowledge.

If we remember our aim, this is where AI can be a powerful co-pilot, used to turn distill:

• Summarize across countless sources and surface contradictions.
• Trace the lineage of information to verify evidence and attribution.
• Personalize insights and make them relevant to a specific role or context.

But used poorly, we'll flood our lives with data, collapsing meaning for tokens.

We live in a world awash with information, but we seem to face a growing scarcity of wisdom. And what’s worse, we confuse the two. We believe that having access to more information produces more knowledge, which results in more wisdom. But, if anything, the opposite is true — more and more information without the proper context and interpretation only muddles our understanding of the world rather than enriching it.

That quote is from 2014 by Maria Popova: Wisdom in the Age of Information and the Importance of Storytelling in Making Sense of the World: An Animated Essay

Ultimately, the journey from data to knowledge isn't a mechanical process; it's a creative one. It's about finding the story. The raw data is just the language, but the story is what gives it purpose and meaning.

More than knowledge, it is all stories.

“There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.”

― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky