I think we're inching closer to fundamental first principles. That makes it easy to get one's hackles raised, but it is also why I find this debate so interesting. (More interesting than the article, fo'sho.)

I had dreams of being a designer but when I discovered that they have no control or input into the actual mechanics of a thing (other than often complicating the simple) I opted out. Slagging on designers has been a pastime of mine for decades.

Last week I had a conversation with an agency where we talked through my CV and their job pool. I told them the (abridged) story of how I ended up with urban planning: basically, I thoroughly looked at architecture but found it to be too narrow, teaching you to become a hip designer and nothing useful. I looked at civil engineering but I don't enjoy doing math and the job prospects boiled down to "you're responsible for the math, you nerd" so I knew it wasn't something for me. Urban planning, being somewhere in between and touching on topics from history to psychology to economics to demography, felt to me like a much more interesting avenue to explore. (And I still think I made the right choice.)

A year ago I did a MSc bridge design course at the very school of architecture that I dismissed six years ago. I liked the course but I was so glad I didn't do that for five years - my peers knew almost nothing about physics, mechanics, economics, psychology, geography or sociology, they just knew how to think about aesthetics and the rationale behind it. They were great at that, but I was the only non-architect in the room so I witnessed all those other considerations that do fucking matter being ignored 'cuz design, bro. And even though I have only skirted with construction mechanics, I had to be the guy pointing out that a 150ft span really can't be done with a 4" bridge deck. When the professor (a veteran bridge designer) explained how the sausage gets made, he said that making the design is only a small part of the work. The rest is going back and forth with the structural engineers to actually get something resembling the original design. But that wasn't part of the course, or any course given there for that matter.

My fundamental argument is that the data doesn't care. Do not assign intentions and motives to the data. People care - people care a lot, and they should care a lot. What people do with data is pretty much... science. And science policy. And therefore policy. And therefore vital.

Can you really separate the two like that? Is data always objective enough to be something beyond the perils of humans? As an extreme example, some local governor here came up with the term 'horsification' and a measure 'average amount of horses per acre' to quantify the demise of the countryside due to an increase in horses. You could totally do a time series analysis classifying horses with aerial photography and some ML, getting the data, but you can't deny that the data is meant to create a problem that wasn't there before. In other words: because people care, because there are people with interests and motives and intentions involved, numbers are or aren't looked at, considered and / or chosen.

Whether that is oppressive or not is another story, but 'just get the data' can definitely be countered with 'for whose benefit?'. Good enough for whom? Because what's good enough might be totally different depending on who you ask.