Touching vs. Understanding

Robin Hanson:

On the plane home last week I talked to a sharp Yale historian, and realized we devote far more resources to preserving historical sites, and to making history available via museums, than we do to funding professional historians to make sense of it all. That reminded me of complaints that NASA spends far more on sending instruments into space to collect data than it does on funding scientists to analyze that data. In both cases we collect far more data than ever gets carefully analyzed.

Now part of the explanation must be that the public can more easily see historical sites, museums, and space instruments than historians and data analysts. But that doesn't seem to me a sufficient explanation - I suspect we are also just more interested in touching the past, and in touching space, than in understanding either. We talk about understanding because that is a modern applause light, but really we just like to touch exotic things. The more we can touch, the further is our reach, and the more important and powerful we must be. I wonder how much more this explains.

I don't know. I have two hypotheses that I think may explain what's going on:

1) It costs more to collect the data than it does to analyze. On the margin, hiring more analysts may not enhance our understanding much.

2) Preserving historical sites and launching space probes are both high-visibility examples of public expenditures that politicians use to show evidence of their hard work and help secure votes. Data analysis is much less showy and harder to appreciate than a large builiding or rocket blasting into space.