Urban hiking and the data trap: A walk through Palermo towards the Planetarium

 
How many times do we walk through the city guided solely by the inertia of routine or the numbers on a screen? Today we put on our sneakers to go on an urban hiking journey and low-intensity steady-state (LISS) urban march. It is an active yet contemplative route, ideal for connecting with the urban landscape and, along the way, reflecting on how we interpret the world around us.

📍 The Route: From the city to the cosmos The starting point was the intersection of Av. Scalabrini Ortiz and Av. Santa Fe, in the heart of Palermo. From there, the itinerary led us to connect different emblematic corners of the neighborhood:

•    Av. Santa Fe → República Árabe Siria
•    Av. Las Heras → República de la India
•    Av. del Libertador → Av. Sarmiento

The final stretch led us to the iconic Galileo Galilei Planetarium, looping around Dr. Benjamín Apthorp Gould Square and enjoying the greenery surrounding its lakes.

📊 The trap of data and steps At the end of the walk, the activity app recorded a total of 9,669 steps, accompanied by eye-catching charts with patterns of speed, distance, and calories burned.

It is easy to get carried away by the precision of technology and assume that if we walk almost 10,000 steps today and the chart looks impeccable, the exact same thing will happen tomorrow. However, skeptical thinking reminds us of something crucial: accumulating past data (no matter how accurate the chart is) never fully guarantees what will happen in the future.

 
🦆 The illusion of the park duck and the metaphor of the inductive turkey While walking around the Planetarium lake, I watched the ducks walking calmly among the visitors. The park's white duck walks confidently, expecting every passerby or tourist to mean a crumb of bread. It trusts blindly in the regularity of the urban environment.

This scene connects directly with the screenshots from our activity app: we measure our routine day by day, expecting repetition to constitute a universal rule. This refers back to a famous philosophical metaphor: The Allegory of the Inductive Turkey (or inductive duck/swan), set forth by the skeptical philosopher Bertrand Russell in his work The Problems of Philosophy (1912).

"Experience has shown us that the frequent repetition of a uniform sequence is the cause of our expecting the same repetition on the next occasion. [...] Business men who have had a great deal of experience are so fully persuaded that the future will resemble the past that they sometimes completely fail.

The man who has fed the turkey every day throughout its life will at last request his friend to strike a neat blow-or rather, the man who feeds the turkey does so every day until at last one day out of seven-no, on the eve of Christmas-it is not fed, but instead its throat is cut, thus showing that an expectation based upon repeated induction does not always guarantee absolute truth."

— Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (1912).

📖 The story of the Inductive Turkey: Step by step

1.    The observation: A turkey arrives at a farm and notices that on its first day it is fed at exactly 9:00 AM.

2.    The accumulation of data: Like a good inductivist, it does not jump to hasty conclusions. It observes for months under all kinds of circumstances: rainy days, sunny days, cold or hot weeks. It is always fed at 9:00 AM.

3.    The universal law: After accumulating hundreds of consistent pieces of evidence, the turkey formulates an indisputable scientific law: "I am always fed at 9:00 AM."

4.    The refutation: The turkey wakes up on Christmas Eve feeling completely sure of its theory. It expects its food at 9:00 AM. However, it is not fed that day: the farmer cuts its throat for dinner.

💡 What does this walk teach us?

•    The limitations of induction: History shows that no amount of observations in favor can prove a theory absolutely, but a single observation to the contrary is enough to destroy it.

•    The false sense of security: The longer a pattern works (whether on the farm, in the daily steps of an app, or in everyday life), the more confident we feel, right when a drastic change may be closest.

•    From Russell to "Black Swans": Years later, Nassim Taleb adapted this metaphor for the financial and statistical realm with his Black Swan theory: highly improbable events that are impossible to predict using historical data, yet have a devastating impact when they occur.

At the end of the day, the Galileo Galilei Planetarium functions as a temple of the cosmos: it frames us in the constant search for knowledge, but it also reminds us of the limits of what we can truly predict.

Walking is not just tallying steps on an app; it is an opportunity to pause, observe the surroundings, and remember that the future is not always a simple copy of the past.

Wikiloc link: https://es.wikiloc.com/rutas-senderismo/walk-through-palermo-caba-planetarium-292600779