Top-Down Investigation, Bottom-Up Verification
John Beaudoin, Sr. is a distiller of data
The April 8, 2024 session of the IPAK-EDU Director’s Science Webinar featured the research of John Beaudoin, Sr. This presentation of his research is both jarring, disquieting, and simultaneously compelling, representing his dogged effort to pursue the story of the data buried in millions of death records.
Here’s a clip from the webinar: meet John.
First published in the US in 1943, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince begins with a humorous childhood recollection. Ironically, his novella was only published posthumously in his native France as his work had been banned by the Vichy regime.
Here are the first two pages from the timeless story.
Two drawings of the same thing: a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. One version as the child instinctively first drew it, and another ‘so that the grown-ups could see it clearly.’
Saint-Exupery’s drawings are the very same thing viewed through different filters.
What resonates here is how one’s perspective, or filter, can radically alter how one perceives, and what one chooses to represent. That perspective can be a product of a range of influences, some very limiting, even damaging: a blindspot, a self-imposed myopia, a cultural bias, or as has been recently evident—propaganda and indoctrination.
If the boa constrictor swallowing the elephant is the data, how do you filter it? How do you represent it? What makes it meaningful, for a six year old, or grown-ups who ‘never understand anything on their own’?
What if you don’t know it’s a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant to begin with?
Beaudoin shows us how he applied different tools, alongside shifts in filters and perspective, to uncover the story in the data.
How do you investigate when you do not know what you’re looking for?
Coming up, we’ll continue to look at several clips from the full talk. Stay tuned.
#questioneverything
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Check out John on Substack and at The Real CdC.