Accumulate to speculate
People like people who say what they mean and mean what they say.
So, if you want to be someone that people like, it helps to be an etymology geek. It helps to understand the deep, embedded meaning of the words that you choose to express your ideas.
For example, what does it really mean to speculate?
Speculate is derived from the Latin verb, specere, which means 'to look' or 'to look at.' Many English words share this root on a literal basis: spectacles, inspect, aspect for example. However, the meaning of speculate has evolved over time. At first, it too had a literal meaning: to look at. But its interpretation has become increasingly figurative over the years. For a while, to speculate was to contemplate or meditate on. Latterly, to speculate is to take on a financial risk in the hope or expectation of a healthy return. To speculate in an investment context requires a combination of insight and imagination. It's a process of informed contemplation.
So here we are at our destination topic. I hope you enjoyed the etymological scenic route by which we finally got to the point.
Namely: when I say, 'speculate,' I say what I mean and I mean what I say, and what I mean is informed contemplation.
And?
Well, data is useless without informed contemplation.
Data isn't inherently meaningful. Meaning is constructed through a process of informed contemplation. We gather data, then we interpret. We accumulate to speculate.
There's an interesting book about the data revolution in football (soccer), called Expected Goals. It tells the story of the barbarian geeks at the gates of the beautiful game. In the early days, it was all accumulation and no speculation. The passage below quotes Mike Forde, Chelsea's Performance Director, describing what was effectively a data swamp from which they had little prospect, at the time, of draining any intelligence.
The sport was suffused with data. Forde, for example, would tell the Financial Times a year after that conference, in 2011, that his team had now logged somewhere in the region of '32 million data points from 12,000 or 13,000 games'. What nobody had worked out at that stage was what any of it meant. From Expected Goals by Rory Smith.
Data analytics in football had to endure a long, 'So what?' period. Data is Frankenstein's inanimate monster. It needs a lightning strike of informed contemplation to spark it to life.
This reminded me of a story my daughter told me from her university exchange year in Australia. On her travels she was reading Down Under by Bill Bryson. She sent me a photograph of this passage:
...they devoted disproportionate efforts to enterprises that no one even now can understand. All around the coast of Australia the early explorers found huge shell mounds, up to thirty feet high and covering at the base as much as half an acre. Often these were some distance inland and uphill. The Aborigines clearly had made some effort to convey the shells from the beach to the mounds — one midden was estimated to contain 33,000 cubic metres of shells — and they kept it up for an enormously long time: at least 800 years in one case. Why did they bother? No one knows. In almost every way it was as if they answered to some different laws.
My subsequent internet search seemed to confirm this. There were plenty of theories about what the purpose of these shell middens might be, but no definitive explanation. No scientific or sociological speculation had been able to make sense of the indigenous accumulation.
It turns out that all these experts had to do was ask.
The tour guide who showed my daughter round K'gari (Fraser Island) explained why his ancestors had collected shells in such large numbers. The middens were a form of bookkeeping.
It's no secret that we have a lot to learn from indigenous peoples about living sustainably. Shellfish were an important part of the Aboriginal diet, and by discarding shells on these mounds they kept a visible record of their consumption.
There was method behind the middens. And in this case, the speculation was indivisible from the accumulation. The meaning was midden in plain sight. If stocks of one type of shellfish were depleted, it would be plain to see, and the locals would alter their diet accordingly to allow them to replenish.
A shell midden wasn't a data stack in the way that a contemporary technician would recognise it, but it was a stack of data.
Another etymological interpretation of speculate is 'to consider from a vantage point.' In this case the vantage points of Western culture and contemporary science actually hindered the process of speculation. People were looking at (i.e. speculating) the shell middens through the wrong eyes.
We've come from expected goals to unexpected shells and back again. Early sporting directors looking at football data, and contemporary scientists looking at shells, were both overwhelmed by the accumulation. Without speculation, without informed contemplation from an appropriate vantage point, data is all noise and no signal.
Having the best data in the world... is of little or no advantage if the signals it can send are not communicated well to the managers, the coaches, the scouts and the players who can benefit from it. From Expected Goals by Rory Smith.