Data Te Ching, ch 5

Our universe is a squishy one
It acts in probabilities over absolutes
“How much of the time?” we wonder
“Exactly” it jokes “Now you see!”

Reality is all gradients
Drill down on any one thing
And soon you’ll find
It isn’t even there
Things dissolve to into relationships
Tendencies are all we have
All we are

But we count discretely
Orienting to objects
Seeing entities
Expressing data
As if it were there

Representations work well enough
Except for the times they don’t
Whenever they don’t
We may humbly retrace to the question
To finally reveal our answer
It was there all along

When it comes to data
Encoding is foreboding
How we decide what counts
Determines what is counted

As we define, so do we create
Revealing patterns in data
To help us better pretend
That we understand
What truly is