But other than that — touching is easy to explain, to “have something to show for it”. Everyone accepts that it’s expensive to get a bunch of shiny machines and collect a heap of data; they can see what it is. Does everyone accept that it’s expensive to get a 300-page report explaining it? Or, worse, to get a report on why that data doesn’t tell us what we hoped it would? How many people would consider the money spent to fund that analysis wasted?

Fetishizing objects (or objects of attention) in general is easy. You need to get physically close to them and then immediately you have something that not everyone has. And then you check it off and move on to the next thing. Really knowing about what they are is hard; you sink effort into it and it takes more time than going on a whirlwind tour. Traveling, too, seems to be more about “seeing the sights” than knowing the city. Checking the checkboxes, contrasted with facing the unfamiliar. Surface interactions, that take money and time and physical effort but less deep understanding, either to get them yourself or to show others.

(When I was a kid I loved to find signed books — an object that was once touched by someone I admired. People who wrote books were distant to me and that was the only way I knew to get close to them. Now I think signed books are silly; I know real live authors! “I had a great conversation with X about his book” is much more thrilling than “I have a signed book”. But there’s nothing I can display, even though what I actually have is more valuable.)

We’re also saying by such choices that there’s value in objects themselves, and that the information is not as valuable — asserting there is something special about the object even if enough information exists to indistinguishably recreate it, or at least to transmit everything important about it. It’s the sort of thought that finds mind uploading abhorrent because it would never be the real thing — that think what’s real is what we can sense directly, and what can’t be copied or recreated; being reproducible, or reducible to parts we can reproduce, lessens its value, so we insist there is no way to replace the original. People feel cheated if they see a celebrity impersonator in place of the star even if they couldn’t tell while she was performing, or to receive a perfect diamond created in a lab rather than one mined from the ground.

(Hm, longer braindump than I started out intending…)

I think that’s altogether different, but in a sense, yes. People form one-sided relationships with celebrities through mass media, and the desire to meet celebrities is, I think, the desire to make that relationship more real. There’s definitely also a desire for fame by association, just like seeing historical locations gives you some sort of intellectual bragging rights. But I don’t think that’s the whole story, and I don’t think the analogy works that well, mostly because people’s ideas about celebrities are largely, if not entirely, fictional and idealized, and firsthand experience is likely to be at odds with that. Firsthand experience of historical sites, however, is complementary to history.

I tend to agree that the public doesn’t care all that much about it; for example, more people would be interested in seeing images from the hubble space telescope than would care to read more than a paragraph explaining what they’re looking at. This may be in part because it’s less tangible, but I also think it may just not matter. Even if we don’t know what we’re looking at, there’s probably very little long-term benefit or glamour in analysis of the vast majority of the data collected.

It’s also easy enough to assume someone else will analyze the data if it’s released to the public. But without robust collection and preservation, analysis is impossible. Since collection and preservation are the prerequisite to analysis, and the data can always be stored and examined later, it’s easier to err on the side of collecting and preserving too much data than it is to risk having too little.

Claudio, yes buying more books than we read seems a related example.

James, Caplan has convinced me public opinion dominates – concentrated interests only get their way on aspects the public doesn’t care about.

Matt, you lost me.