Hickey seems to have taken his cite of "data"'s definition as "a thing given" as axiomatic, requiring no further thought on the implicit following questions like "given by whom?" and "by what means?", and this severely limits the scope of his analysis versus Kay's, this I think being what had them talking past one another.
In industry, the incentives seem very rarely to line up such that questions like those are welcome.
Yeah. As a general rule of thumb, dictionaries are simplistic, and extremely lagging, signals about everything a word can be about. No offense to dictionaries, since their goal is to be a succinct, useful, and universal summary of words, but it's usually a mistake to trot them out in an argument.
Would you take a dictionary's definition as the final matter on a complex philosophical topic, like epistemology? Or its starting point?
It gets even worse in the realm of something like politics, where different groups have contended over, and actively fought to redefine, the meanings of words over time.
Hickey seems to have taken his cite of "data"'s definition as "a thing given" as axiomatic, requiring no further thought on the implicit following questions like "given by whom?" and "by what means?", and this severely limits the scope of his analysis versus Kay's, this I think being what had them talking past one another.
In industry, the incentives seem very rarely to line up such that questions like those are welcome.