Measurement, Dataism and Post-Truth Ideology: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Our society is producing data in amounts orders of magnitude larger than even in the recent past, from many heterogeneous sources, often with no or poor information on their quality [1]. In this unprecedented situation, measurement, traditionally a privileged tool of trustworthy information production [2], [3], is at a crossroads: will it maintain and indeed enhance its societal role, or will it become progressively irrelevant, losing its specificity? In this complex and uncertain scenario, under discussion is the social role of metrology itself-the "science of measurement and its applications," according to the International Vocabulary of Metrology [4]. Some insights on this matter seem particularly important today, when the more and more available big data are inducing qualitative, and not only quantitative, changes in the role attributed to data in decision-making processes that pervade our daily life [5]. We propose here to understand the current situation as induced by the tension between two opposing ideologies: dataism and post-truth. After a short introduction to such ideologies, we mention a few reasons why the metrological culture, standing in between these two extremes, could have a strategic role in a forthcoming knowledge-based society.