Support not Illumination

The other night on NPR's Intelligence Squared, a modern day marvel of civil debate that I highly recommend, someone quoted Andrew Lang (1884-1912), albeit incorrectly attributing the quote to Mark Twain, as a caution against relying too heavily on statistics. Lang stated that we should use "statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than for illumination." This concept can and should be extended to the modern day combination of big data, AI and algorithms, though by the time the virtuous cycle of ingesting, analyzing and automating through algorithms has been created, the analogy has gone way beyond lampposts to the very sidewalk under our feet, which gives us great confidence and comfort as we stroll along said sidewalk, until a 1970 Buick Skylark comes careening off the road and runs us over ;-)