Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a feeling that some types of data will become a bit like "the DNA wealth of the rainforest", valuable because it's so rich, different and rare. In particular small and/or dying human languages. Languages carry with them an immense amount of information, from all the precious human experiences that have shaped them.
Languages at fine granularity and narrative complexes at high granularity. Some people explicitly refer to stories as the most efficient compression mechanisms there is, by a large margin. There is a reason the Hutter prize is what it is. Which, in a supreme irony for the positivist types, rationally entails that folk tales and the Bible (gasp) are the most valuable data there is.
You might argue that if it's old and still common today then it must have guided the people who followed it well in order to survive so long, engaging in a kind of natural selection of ideas, but the thing is that ideas can also fall prey to suboptimal equilibria and all sorts of other evolutionary weirdness and badness. Like, the success of an idea is not directly related to how good the idea actually is for the people that follow it. As long as it isn't bad enough to kill off all its followers, an idea can spread by many other means. Maybe it's better at spreading, through appealing to our baser natures or cognitive biases, maybe it's good at locking itself in through thought stopping cliches and fear of reprisal and stuff like Pascal's Wager/Roko's Basilisk. Or maybe it's really good at setting up interlocking peer pressure and network effects and social enforcement of continuing to believe it. Or maybe it's better at suppressing other ideas. Or maybe it's better at creating a group geared toward conquest or evangelism, but actually living under it sucks otherwise. Maybe it's just really beneficial to a small group of people in power and so they work really hard to spread it. Not to mention, it only had to compete against the actual ideas that existed contemporary with ut in history and were strong enough to create evolutionary pressure, so if a new idea comes along about how to organize society or whatever, we don't actually know if it will automatically win out just because it won out against other different ideas in the past. What would we think an idea is unimprovable or optimal just because it is old? The long term existence and popularity of an idea or tradition doesn't necessarily make it good at all. Would you say that the Bible's injunctions against e.g. divorce or homosexuality or women being able to teach and hold positions of authority are encoded wisdom? The most valuable data there is?
I'm by no means an actual positivist, which is an incoherent position, but I am a pragmatist, and I think the only way to actually figure out if a tradition is worth anything is to look at its reasoning, its assumptions, its history, and its effects in the world.