The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore laments the devaluation of truth in politics with the rise of “big data”:
The era of the fact is coming to an end: the place once held by “facts” is being taken over by “data.” This is making for more epistemological mayhem, not least because the collection and weighing of facts require investigation, discernment, and judgment, while the collection and analysis of data are outsourced to machines.
