Blurring of context

To truly understand why people buy products, we must dig deep into the context of the decision process. So many companies are taking the easy way out, they crunch big data hoping to glean insight and make decisions based on patterns. But patterns in data only reflect correlation. Considering the complexity of the human behavior and the world they interact with, one can’t really derive causality from behavioral data alone. We are constrained by blurring.

Carlo Rovelli, in “The order of time”, describes this notion as it relates to the physics of the universe.

In it’s anxious pursuit of objectivity, science must not forget that our experience of the world comes from within. Every glance that we cast towards the world is made from a particular perspective.

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If we give a description of the world that ignores point of view, that is solely “from the outside” — of space, of time, of a subject — we may be able to say many things but we lose certain crucial aspects of the world. Because the world that we have been given is the world seen from within, not from without.

Many things that we see in the world can be understood only if we take into account the role played by point of view. They remain unintelligible if we fail to do so. In every experience, we are situated within the world: within a mind, a brain, a position is space, a moment in time.