meaning
He derived insights from vast datasets.
In retrospect, I had my perfect project in Stories. The business we were building (finding the most important business stories) was an incarnation of a fundamental life question (what’s important?). In a way, the startup was a vehicle for practical, fundamental, philosophical research. That’s what made the quest meaningful even in the toughest moments: when we lost our only customer, the stories weren't good enough, our only frontend engineer turned alcoholic, sales took too long, our first acquisition offer fell through… But one thing never changed through the ups and downs: the conviction that we were asking the right question and had to keep going. When spirits were down, the question held us. Even if we folded, nothing else would be more important to answer.
That was the time when I started reading anything I could get my hands on. I switched from Kant’s philosophy to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, logical paradoxes, fractal modelling, supersymmetric quan-tum mechanics, Bohm’s holographic universe, information theory, Elliott’s market waves, the rise and fall of Eastern empires, and the Japanese art of composition. I devoured data like I was trying to com-pete with Faustomat. We were both crawling through the internet, desperately craving grand symmetries. And the topics were not cho-sen consciously. My wandering thoughts simply followed the scent of paradox. Months passed, and I eventually found myself near those dark places…
Encouraged by the discovery, he spent the next three hours finding a suitable data visualization app online, learning to use it, uploading eighteen hundred records with his thoughts, moods, and tags, and, at four in the morning, Adam the Data Scientist glimpsed himself for the first time ever. He was staring at the graph, enthralled, and clenched his fists quietly: that’s me! A map of Adam. A bonsai of the brain. A complete synapticon.
