Today, with the rapid development of the Internet blowout, we have long stepped into the information society. Information is not scarce, but our ability to process it is, and our limited attention is the main bottleneck of organizational activities. Through big data to assist decision-making, the scope of human rationality will be expanded, and the quality of decision-making can be improved.

How much do you know about the big data around us in 2018? In this era of big data, one of the problems facing human society is how to better utilize data to aid decision-making.

"If the traditional mindset of precision is applied to the data-driven, networked 21st century, important information will be missed, and the obsession with precision is a product of the age of lack of information. When we have a large amount of new types of data, precision is less important, not because of the reliance on precision, we can equally grasp the trend of things." Shaanxi Huaxin Zhiyuan Zhang said.

Compared with the era of relying on small data and precision, big data, because of its greater emphasis on data completeness and mixing, helps us get closer to the truth. The appeal of "partial" and "exact" is understandable. But when our vision is limited to the data we can analyze and be sure of, our understanding of the world as a whole can be faulty and biased.

One change in mindset in the age of big data is to stop obsessing about precision and embrace chaos. Another shift in mindset is to place more emphasis on correlation, rather than being paranoid about the pursuit of causation based on assumptions.

Correlations are also useful in a world of small data, but in the context of big data, they shine. By applying correlations, we can analyze things easier, more conveniently, and more clearly than ever before.

Correlations help us analyze a phenomenon by identifying useful correlates, not by revealing its inner workings. Of course, even strong correlations don't necessarily explain every situation; for example, two things that appear to behave similarly may well be just coincidental. There are no absolutes in correlations, only possibilities.