I think politicians know how to misrepresent data in order to support a political agenda. Politicians and the people that work for them - I should say - are expert at that.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Politicians often misuse science for political ends and to pursue their own agenda.
People are used to getting a lot of information quickly, and they're used to being quite empowered as consumers, and they go to governments expecting a similar treatment; they want to find data and they want to influence events quickly, and yet they come into this brick wall.
Data is the fabric of the modern world: just like we walk down pavements, so we trace routes through data, and build knowledge and products out of it.
Those who cry out that the government should 'do something' never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.
The people who are thinking most about big data right now are corporations and governments.
Experts often possess more data than judgment.
On average, people should be more skeptical when they see numbers. They should be more willing to play around with the data themselves.
People believe the best way to learn from the data is to have a hypothesis and then go check it, but the data is so complex that someone who is working with a data set will not know the most significant things to ask. That's a huge problem.
Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities.
The answers to today's most important scientific, business, and social problems lie in data.