> Science is a battle to find causes and explanations 
> amidst the confusion of data. 

On the other hand, if the data confuses, then one may have stumbled on
something very interesting, and may be about to learn something important.
No one ever said "Eureka" when discovering something, it has always been
"Huh?  What the...?"

> Let us not get too enamored of data science, 
> whose great triumphs so far are mainly in 
> advertising and persuasion. 

But wait... that quote was sent to over a thousand readers at the click of a
mouse.
Isn't that a triumph in itself?

> Data alone has no voice.

Google image search for "visualization examples".  
The science of visualization makes sense of massive datasets, and even cheap
laptops can run most of the programs that slice and dice the data to help
extract new insights that were unavailable before.
If beauty is truth, then visualization allows one to see the truth in the
patterns.

In a similar way, beehives are, in essence best "visualized" on a gestalt
basis and "listened to" on a gestalt basis, as examination of individual
bees is meaningless.

And yes, data DOES have a voice - place an AM radio next to your PC or Mac,
tune between stations, and listen to the data move through your computer.

In a similar vein, many datasets are best listened to rather than
"visualized":
http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/more-than-meets-the-eye-nasa-scientists-
listen-to-data/
http://tinyurl.com/na4qamb

There might be such a thing as "too much data", but over the last 30 years,
the cost to store a gigabyte has gone down by half every 14 months.
As of 2014, it was $0.03 per gig when bought in the form of multi-terabyte
drives at retail, so there is really no reason to erase anything or
complain.
In 1980, a single gigabyte ran about half a mill.  

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