As you may know, I am a huge fan of Christopher Nolan. In one of his first movies, Memento, the main character makes a philosophical mistake that could be very insightful for economics and data science. To keep the things short, information and data are not a substitute for narrative. In the movie, Leonard Shelby suffers from anterograde amnesia that precludes him to form new memories and relies on information notes, and tattoos to understand his reality. While Leonard claims that memories are not a reliable source of information and that data and facts are more reliable, the irony of the situation is that all these pieces of information has been used by Leonard to form a new narrative… That I let you discover in the movie. In times of big data and data-rich environments, data and information need to be interpreted, and we need narrative to try to understand our reality. We require some blindness to form coherent and fluid narratives about our complex world. For Walter Benjamin, it is in the lack of information that we find meaning.
A lot of these thoughts are based on the fantastic YouTube video by Jared Bauer:
Let me add that I would be very pleased to discuss that!