Damn, how frustrating it is trying to tell the status quo how a new move works.

Telling bankers how Bitcoin works has had to be a nightmare.

Telling my mother that DVDs don’t rewind took me a decade.

Impatience.

Look, if a damn 1980s encyclopedia salesman in a time capsule came by, I’d tell him it’s just that I now have an encyclopedia that’s gigantic and much better. And it is updated. And well…

Well, do you know what this encyclopedia salesman would say to me? Do you know what he would say?

“How many volumes does it have?”

 

That asshole would tell me how many volumes does it have, because that’s how his mental universe works.

And because we try to cram the new into the old boxes we have in our brains.

But that, dear friends of big data, is a mistake.

And it happens to me all the time…

Lately there are people who, when I’ve told them my move, say to me:

“Can you pass me your data dictionary?”

…

Lord, take me away soon.

For those who don’t know, a data dictionary is a list of the variables that you have in your registry.

In other words, in a bladder cancer data dictionary, there will be 200 or 300 variables, I don’t know.

The thing is, let’s see how I explain to those who ask me about the data dictionary, that when you read the raw information using Artificial Intelligence from medical records, you get literally tens of thousands of variables. Li-te-ral-lyyyyyyyyyy.

 

And then, yes, you clean them hundred by hundred.

But this is like having the undo button in Windows. The possibilities and combinations are endless.

That as you have a new question, we clean up new variables.

So which data dictionary do you want, today’s, tomorrow’s, the day after?

So that’s it.

If you’ve already got it into your brain what you can do with a new universe of variables and you want to give a punch on the table to those who go with the fountain pen, well, this is it.

I don´t know what else I can tell you.