Social Impact Of Poor Biblical IDQ

This article explores the Social Impact of Poor Biblical Information and Data Quality focusing on two of the sixteen IDQ dimensions, Understandability and Interpretability.

There are "positives" and "negatives" to almost everything, including philosophies. I will consider Religions philosophies because they are methods of deriving, among other things, how we should behave and what we should value. Philosophies can be measured by their success. Their success should be measured by how "trustworthy" and "reliable" they are. Measurements of their "reliability" and "trustworthiness" should be dependent upon how consistent or reproducible the results are. Some philosophies have become so reliable that they have become a science and some have splintered, become obsolete, and neglected. I agree with some who say that Epistemology is one the neglected philosophies. However, in my view, Epistemology is one of the most important endeavors humans can undertake, and I think it is thriving under other names, such as Law, Statistics, Measurement, Science, Artificial Intelligence, Informal Logic and Information and Data Quality Research.

How Recipes are similar to Religions and Philosophies.
Virtues, Morality and Truth Seeking are areas where Religion and Philosophy overlap. It can be summed up as "What is the right way to live?". We can rephrase this question to derive an analogy as "What is the right way to do something?". This is how Recipes, Religions and Philosophies are similar. Once someone has an Epiphany, or a "Good Idea" or a "Good way to make a sauce" they can write it down so it can be learned, reproduced and used as a basis for other things. Once it gets recorded once, it will be read (consumed), interpreted and acted upon to behave in a certain way. The measurement of how successful the Recipe, the Religion or the Philosophy should be is how easy it is reproduce the results or how well it consistently reflects real world states.

The success of Recipes, Religions and Philosophies depends on how easy they are to Understand and Interpret.
My Grandmothers cooking was widely regarded as being some of the best cooking in the area. Not only the family loved her cooking, the Church "Pot-Lucks" eagerly awaited what she was going to contribute next. In her last years, we tried to get her recipes written down, but we were largely unsuccessful. She didn't use recipes. She used her intuition. When she said to add something as a "pinch", "little bit", "dash" etc. it meant nothing to us. When she said "do this until it makes a noise like...", it meant nothing to us. Her terms were too ambiguous for any of us to take a recipe dictated by her and recreate what she cooked. One person, a neighbor, was successful in getting some recipes made from her and built a local catering business out of it. She sold it when she wanted to retire.

Christianity is split up into an heirarchy of denominations and one explanation for that could be that it has a low score in the IDQ dimensions of Understandability and Interpretability.
Recipes, Religions and Philosophies depend on concepts, described by language. It is possible for a word to describe a concept, but sometimes the word depends on the context. Sometimes when you are translating concepts between languages, some languages don't describe a concept in the same way as another language and some languages are missing words for concepts that exist in another language. When this happens, then error creeps into the understanding and interpretation of concepts. A word is used to generally approximate a concept and then it is read (consumed) by another mind through a network of cognitive biases and prior knowledge and stored away categorically in biological storage media, the brain. There is a lot of room for error and ambiguity which leads to poor understandability and interpretability. Interpretability depends on Understandability, so if the information is hard to understand, it will be hard to interpret.

What does Understandability and Interpretability Mean?
The definitions of "Understandability" and "Interpretability" from the Total Data Quality Managment literature are as follows.

Understandability (Ease of understanding):
The extent to which data is easily comprehended.

Interpretability
The extent to which data is in appropriate language, symbols, and units and the definitions are clear.

Interestingly, intepretability plays a very important role in Imaging. I got the following defininion of "interpret" from the field of Military Imagery from answers.com

Military Imagery

"(DOD, NATO) Suitability of imagery for interpretation with respect to answering adequately requirements on a given type of target in terms of quality and scale.
a. poor -- Imagery is unsuitable for interpretation to answer adequately requirements on a given type of target.
b. fair -- Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target but with only average detail.
c. good--Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target in considerable detail.
d. excellent--Imagery is suitable for interpretation to answer requirements on a given type of target in complete detail."
["interpret." Military and Associated Words. US Department of Defense, 2003. Answers.com 04 Jun. 2009. http://www.answers.com/topic/interpretability]

And from Data Warehouse Literature
"the extent to which the data warehouse in modeled effectively in the inforamtion repository and how well maintained the Data Lineage (where the data come from)", "Fundamentals of data warehouses" By Matthias Jarke, Maurizio Lenzerini, Yannis Vassiliou, Panos Vassiliadis
- How easy the queries can be posed? How successful are they?

We all know what an Interpreter is. When you don't speak the language you need an Interpreter, but "interpret" also has specific definitions in other fields such as Mathematics and Logic.

In the Total Data Quality Management literature the Information and Data Quality dimensions are organized into four categories. The catagories are
- Intrinsic IQ,
- Contextual IQ
- Representational IQ:
- Accessibility IQ:

Interpretability and Understandability fall under the "Representational" Category.
Most of the IDQ dimension have clear cut metrics and methods for deriving a score but Understandability and Interpretability are more subjective and require surveying people and analyzing their answers using weighted averages and whatever is common between them. For example if there are two witnesses to a crime.
Witness 1: It was a Black Car.
Witness 2: It was Blue Car.

Using a what is common between them, we can say it is a car. Using a weighted average, without further questioning, we can say that it was more likely a car than a truck so we can give more weight to the car.
1. Car
2. Truck

and we can say that the blue car from witness two was probably a darker shade of blue so we give more weight to darker colors.
1. Dark Blue
2. Light Blue

An example using Christianity is that they all believe in Jesus Christ.
How they define Jesus is another topic.

Quantifying The Understandability and Interpretability Score For Christianity
Since I don't have a survey prepared and don't have the time to randomly select 1000 Christians from random points around the world, It seems to me that one ROUGH way to quantify the IDQ dimensions of Understandability and Interpretability would be to assume that a Christian denomination represents an interpretation of Christianity and to take the total number of Christian denominations and use that as the denomenator, and use the number one to represent Christianity in the following manner.
Just to keep it simple, lets say that there are only two denominations of Christianity, Catholic and Protestant (but we really know there are more)

Christianity/Total Number of Denominations = some percent or score.

so plugging numbers into that, it would be

1/2 = .5 or 50%

So Protestants and Catholics each get a score of .5 out of 1.

Note, that if there were only one denomination of Christianity, the score would be 1. So one is the perfect score. Also note that this method can be used for other things besides Christianity to enable COMPARING the relative scores of Interpretability and Understanding in different fields. If we were a sociology class, we could do it with a newspaper article and survey students about it. Additionally and more importantly, this type of thing is done as part of the reading comprehension portion of some standardized tests.

To derive a score for each denomination of Catholicism and Protestants you could do the same thing, and the number would come out even smaller as you would then have a percentage of a percentage. For example, taking the score for Protestants, and plugging it back into the equation, and assuming a ridiculously small number of protestant denominations would give us a formula as follows

Protestant Score/Total Number of Protestant denominations = Protestant denomination score

so lets assume only two protestant denominations and plug that into the formula as follows

.5/2 = .25

So now each protestant denomination gets a score of .25 out of 1. The more denominations there are the lower the score becomes, justifiably.

As we can see, the scores for Understandability and Interpretability come out pretty low, and that is reflected by the fact that only ~33% of the world is christian and that ~33% is subdivided into smaller denominations.

Who has the right Understanding and Right Interpretation? Who Knows? How are any of them Justified in saying they know anything about "What is the Right Way To Live?".

They are NOT justified, yet they act as if they are, and make decisions that impact society as a whole.

The key problem with information that is not easily understood and interpreted is Ambiguity.
Ambiguity is derived from poor definitions of terms, leading to unreproduceable results. The information is not mapped properly to real world events and objects. The information does not accurately represent the real world.

There are plenty of examples in the real world that depend on non-ambiguous information to produce consistent results.
Mapping
Medicine
Safety
Logistics
Engineering
Recipes
Mathematical models
United nations
and I'm sure you can think up a lot more on your own.

So now, without further delay, I present to you.....

THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF POOR BIBLICAL IDQ
FURTHER READING AND REFERENCE
[Wikipedia should not be considered authoritative but it is a good place to start.]

Inhumane Treatment Of Others
- Anti-abortion violence

- Torture as means to a Justifiable End
-- Torture in the Past
-- Church Attendance And Torture Approval, Valerie Tarico

- Witch hunts
-- Children Are Targets Of Nigerian Witch Hunt, Lee Randolph
-- Causes and Sociology of Witch Hunts, Wikipedia
-- The Terrible Christian Legacy of the Witch Hunts, John Loftus

- Exorcism
-- Exorcism, Wikipedia
-- A Call For The Scientific Investigation of Exorcism, Lee Randolph

- Mental Illness in the Middle Ages
--History Of Mental Disorders, Wikipedia

- Slavery
-- Christianity And Slavery, Wikipedia
-- Slavery And Religion, Wikipedia
- Address To The Colored People, Robert Ingersoll
- Slavery? NO WAY...NONE!

- Manifest Destiny, Exploration and Conquering
-- Manifest Destiny, Wikipedia
-- The Protestant Atrocities: Manifest Destiny and Slavery, John Loftus

- Heresy, Blaming the victim, Wrong Interpretation, "Not Real Christians" when obviously, if they don't get it, its not their fault. The information is of poor quality.
-- Christian Heresy, Wikipedia
-- List Of People Burned As Heretics, Wikipedia
-- Arianism, Wikipedia
--- Inquisition
--- Inquisition, Wikipedia
--- Words From the Inquisition: "Convert or Die!, John Loftus

- Crusades
-- Crusades, Wikipedia

- Behavior, Sin, Biological Bases of Behavior.
-- Link to Many Articles on this topic by Lee Randolph

DENIAL OF ESTABLISHED KNOWLEDGE
- Human Origins and or Evolution
-- Twenty Reasons Why Genesis and Evolution Do Not Mix, Answers in Genesis
-- Answers in Creation, Christian site that generally refutes Answers In Genesis
-- Debunking Creationism

- Faith Healing
-- Court Rules Faith In God And Prayer As Child Abuse, Harry McCall

UNHEALTHY PSYCHOLOGY
Self-Esteem
-- Is Self-Esteem Contrary to Christianity, Christian Article

- Martyr Syndrome
-- Overcome Martyr-Syndrome, WikiHow

- Co-Opts Humans Natural Flawed Reasoning Algorithms
-- List Of Cognitive Biases

MORE ABOUT THE IDQ DIMENSIONS
In the Total Data Quality Management literature the IDQ dimensions are categorized as follows. Interpretability and Understandability fall under the "Representational" Category.
Intrinsic IQ:
Accuracy (Free-from-error), Objectivity, Believability, Reputation

Contextual IQ:
Relevancy, Value-added, Timeliness, Completeness, Amount of Information

Representational IQ:
Interpretability, Understandability, Concise Representation, Consistent Representation

Accessibility IQ:
Access, Security

"Quality and Information and Knowledge", page 43. Huang, Lee, Wang. Prentis Hall PTR

IDQ REFERENCES AND RECOMMENDED READING
Information and Data Quality (IDQ), Newest to oldest
* Journey to Data Quality, 2006, from Amazon
* Data Quality Assessment, 2002
* Information Quality Benchmarks: Product and Service Performance, 2002
* Quality Information and Knowledge, 1999, from Amazon
* AIMQ: A Methodology For Information Quality Assessment, 1997,
Direct Download, may not work
Download from link on the site
* Beyond Accuracy: What Data Quality Means To Consumers, 1996
* Anchoring Data Quality Dimensions in Ontological Foundations, 1996

//////////////////////////////////////
IDQ Applied To The Bible
1. How Accurate is the Bible?
2. Applying Data and Information Quality Principles To The Bible
3. Applying IDQ Principles of Research To The Bible
4. Overview of IDQ Deficiencies Which Are Evident In Scripture
5. Jesus As God From IDQ Design Deficincies
6. "Son of Man" As Jesus From IDQ Deficiencies
7. IDQ Flaw of Meaningless Representation In The Bible

///////////////////////////////////
Triangulation
* "Triangulation", University of California, San Francisco, Global health Sciences
* "Triangulation", Wikipedia

///////////////////////////////////
IDQ Applied
* National Transportation Safety Board information quality standards
* Thank Sully!

//////////////////////////////////
Rebuttals to Criticism of its application to assessing the Bible
* IDQ Flaws Relevant To The Holy Spirit
* Cooking The Books To Avoid IDQ Principles
* Accuracy In Detecting The Spiritual Realm Using "Triangulation"
* Christians Must Be Agnostic