Disclosure: I do not own an airplane, have never owned an airplane, have no experience flying an airplane, and have never served on the Archuleta County Airport Advisory Commission.
In other words, I am researching and writing this editorial series as an ordinary taxpayer with ordinary concerns about our publicly-owned County airport on Piedra Road.
I’m not, however, an ordinary citizen who worships data. In fact, my work at the Daily Post has led me to question the use of ‘data’ in government decision-making processes. Or should I say, the misuse of data.
I’m not the only person with such doubts.
About two-thirds of the way through a wide-ranging 90-minute discussion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology around topics such as truth, politics, journalism, social media, data, and faith… historian Jill Lepore was addressing a question from the audience about how data is being used in the 21st century. The question centered on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Facebook had sold the private personal data of perhaps 250 million users to Cambridge Analytica for use in designing political advertising campaigns.
Facebook settled one aspect of the lawsuit in December 2022 for $725 million, and issued a statement that read, in part: “We look forward to continuing to build services people love and trust, with privacy at the forefront.” A somewhat ironic comment?
Dr. Lepore, speaking in 2018:
“We have kind of a cultural worship of data… that the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica [situation] hasn’t lifted the film from our eyes. People were, like, ‘We were about to vote Mark Zuckerberg to be President just a couple of years ago… but now we hate him.’
“That is just, like, totally kooky and not at all what we should be increasingly concerned about, or troubling to inform ourselves about.
“The bigger question is, what crap you can get away with now, by saying you’re working with data. And even impose on other people. And even foot a tax bill for, by saying that.
“It diminishes all other ways of knowing, and realms of knowledge. And that is a huge crisis…”
As mentioned in Part Two yesterday, Dr. Lepore has a particular definition for ‘data’. In her books and articles, the term ‘data’ means number sets that are too large and too complex to be analyzed by a human being, so instead the analysis is done by computers. But the results — truthful or not — are used by human beings to sell ideas, products, candidates, and anything else that can be sold.
The data might sometimes be used to calculate, or promote, tax increases.
I’ve often used ‘data’ here in the Daily Post to support my perspective on certain local and national issues. Data is truly easy to come by, and to create, in 2023. The new Archuleta County property valuations that were mailed out this past spring, for example, were based on ‘data’ that meets Dr. Lepore’s definition of ‘computer-generated’.
Increasingly, our 21st century definition of ‘political truth’ has come to mean: ‘whatever numbers can be generated by computers.’ When we want to know whether something is ‘true’, we have a tendency to ask the computer scientists and programmers.
The priests of the 21st century, you might say. The special people who have access to ‘divine knowledge’.
An example:
At a cost of $18,000, the Archuleta School District (ASD) recently acquired a data set from the consultants at Keating Research, following Keating’s survey of 300 registered voters. The object of the survey was to gauge support (or lack thereof) for a potential ballot measure on the November 2023 ballot. (Archuleta County has about 11,000 registered voters.)
On Monday this week, during a public Zoom meeting attended by the local media, an ASD-appointed ‘Mill Levy Override’ advisory group tentatively recommended draft wording for a potential ballot measure.
Disclosure: I serve on the Pagosa Peak Open School (PPOS) Board of Directors, and PPOS, as a public charter school, directly benefits from property taxes collected by Archuleta School District. I also served as the PPOS Board representative on the MLO advisory committee just mentioned.
The final decision about whether to place this question on the ballot will be made by the elected ASD School Board. But the computer-processed survey results presented by Keating Research will no doubt serve as a key piece of information for the School Board.
I will be writing about the MLO (Mill Levy Override) question in a future editorial. But my point here is that the (still tentative) decision by the advisory committee, to recommend a ballot question, was driven largely by the people at Keating Research and their computers.
A different consulting firm — Magellan Strategies — conducted a similar computer-aided survey a year ago, on behalf of the County and Town governments. According to Magellan’s survey of 1,081 voters, a sales tax increase to be used for road maintenance and other important things appeared likely to pass by a sizeable margin. Magellan’s data showed that about 62% of the voters supported the sales tax increase.
When the ballots were counted in November, only about 27% had voted ‘Yes’.
I have no idea how many computers were involved in this breathtaking failure by Magellan Strategies to accurately predict an election outcome. But I take this lesson to mean: data carefully created with the aid of computers can be spectacularly inaccurate… even when 1,081 people get polled in a supposedly unbiased survey.
With that lesson in mind, let’s take a look at the EIS that our Archuleta County Board of County Commissioners approved earlier this month… an “Economic Impact Study” related to the County airport at Stevens Field.
In the process, we will also be looking at an earlier EIS presented to the BOCC back in 2012.