just as the most brilliant thinkers of the age failed to make progress while practicing in secret, secret algorithms based on secret data are likely to lead to missed opportunities for improvement.

Alchemy is not the same as gathering big datasets and developing pattern-recognizing algorithms. For one thing, alchemy is impossible, and deriving insights from big data is not. Yet the parallels should also be obvious. The likes of Google and Target are no more keen to share their datasets and algorithms than Newton was to share his alchemical

our preconceptions are powerful things. We filter new information. If it accords with what we expect, we’ll be more likely to accept it.

Premature enumeration is not just an intellectual failure. Not asking what a statistic actually means is a failure of empathy, too.

As our communication, leisure, and commerce are moving to the internet, and the internet is moving into our phones, our cars, and even our spectacles, life can be recorded and quantified in a way that would have been hard to imagine just a decade ago.

An algorithm, meanwhile, is a step-by-step recipe[*] for performing a series of actions, and in most cases “algorithm” means simply “computer program.” But over the past few years, the word has come to be associated with something quite specific: algorithms have become tools for finding patterns in large sets of data.

Second, keeping score was important.

There’s a sweet spot for curiosity: if we know nothing, we ask no questions; if we know everything, we ask no questions either. Curiosity is fueled once we know enough to know that we do not know.

the more curious we are, the less our tribalism seems to matter.