Hard Problems We Like

You can't throw a stone these days without hitting an article about "big data." There's endless advice on how you can be more "data-driven" (we prefer "data-informed"); how data can drive you and your business to infinite success; how X or Y analytics product will make your data dreams reality. People talk a lot about how "big" data can be, but much less about how "big" the problem data itself actually presents; that's a problem we've only barely begun to tackle. I don't mean the day-to-day hard things we deal with -- the janitorial slog of cleaning data, formulating SQL, building charts, getting your data infra right -- I mean the larger picture. How do we go about the business of translating the bits we collect at (often) massive scale into actual human knowledge.