Google Begat the End of the Scientific Method?

TheSauce writes "In a fairly concise one-pager from Chris Anderson, at Wired, the editor posits that all of our current (or now previous) models for collecting data are dead. The content is compelling. It notes that we've entered the Age of the Petabyte — where one can collect immense amounts of data that are paradigm agnostic. It goes on to add a comment from the head of Google's R&D, that we need an update to George Box's maxim: 'All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.' Have we reached a time where all of our tool-sets are now made moot by vast clouds of information and strictly applied maths?"

Comments

Not quite

[edwebdev]

Until cells, molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles start publishing blogs, the scientific method will remain useful.

Re:Not quite

[cp.tar]

Quite.

And no matter the amounts of data, no matter the computing power, I don't think pure statistics will ever be able to analyze human language efficiently.

Re:Not quite

[Kamineko]

I'm made out of those you insensitive clod.

Re:Not quite

[Anonymous Coward]

Sir, surely you mock that cromulent work which so clearly embiggens the scientific community.

Re:WTF indeed

[eggoeater]

"WTFey"
I hadn't seen WTF adjective-ised before, but I love it... there's just so much I can use it with. In fact, I gotta go now and tell my boss how my project is going....

One word:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Computers."

Honestly, that's about the gist of the article, and it left me wondering just what the point of it was. Until I remembered the career advice from The Graduate.

Re:WTF indeed

[mrchaotica]

adjective-ised

And I hadn't seen adjective verbed!

Re:Definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, charisma and dexterity are very important.

Re:Don't rule science out it.

[feed_me_cereal]

He didn't bother writing more than one rambling page because he figured someone said it better somewhere else on the internet and that we're all bound to find it.

Re:Ahem

[clang_jangle]

Data is data. It is raw, and unanalysed, and as such the notion of a paradigm is completely irrelevant.

Well, we already know it wants to be free, so maybe now it's just exercising its sentient status in other areas.

Re:Ahem

[loonycyborg]

the article proves that you can be almost entirely incoherent and still get your article published in Wired And linked to on slashdot even!

Re:WTF indeed

[MightyMartian]

It reads like some sort of brain-damaged new-age technohippy tripe. Yeah, we don't need methodologies any more, because, maaaan, we've got tubes! Gimme a break.

Paradigm agnostic

[Anonymous Coward]

I firmly believe in paradigm. Call me what you will: "paradigm freek", "irrational", "stupid", etc...

Nothing will shake my faith in data or the paradigm. My faith has given me peace and happiness. I just hope you agnostics and paradigm atheists respect my beliefs and I'll respect yours.

Thank you and peace.

When people say shit like this...

[iluvcapra]

Have we reached a time where all of our tool-sets are now made moot by vast clouds of information and strictly applied maths?"

It means there's about to be an explosion in models and theoretical sciences. Always beware the End of History ;)

It depends

[geekoid]

Fighter classes generally stop at con, where as Casters generally for Int or Wis. No one cares about Cha.

Re:It depends

[camperdave]

I don't know. They say you can get more with an 18 charisma and a sword than you can with a sword alone.

Re:It depends

[melikamp]

Never rolled a bard? Please turn in your geek card on your way out.

Re:It depends

[Wandering Wombat]

I failed my save and coughed coffee out my nose...

Re:It depends

[Hijacked Public]

I've rickrolled a guy who rolled a bard, does my card get stamped for that?

Re:The problem with this newly coined 'age'.

[Vectronic]

Petaphile

1) Someone who loves their pets more than human beings or, at the extreme, someone willing to kill a human to save a lower animal's life.

2) Somebody who has sex with animals because they cannot attract any humans, or they are attracted to animals

(and the best one)

3) someone so caught up in his own egomaniacle conception of the world that he is compelled to spew vomit and blood on a strangers clothes to show his contempt for anybody's thought but his own.

Which sounds kinda like the summary for the article, as well as some of the article.

Re:Definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

Wisdom does come after intelligence in the stat arrays.

Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha

There's no getting around it, Wisdom is simply a good dump stat for most classes.

Re:Definitions

[Anonymous Coward]

Feel free to continue using Charisma as a dump stat, though.

Wired.

[E-Sabbath]

You know, this may be the most pure Wired article I've read in a long time. Reminds me of the magazine's layout when it first came out. Complete bull, unreadable, unstructure, but slick.

Re:WTF indeed

[melikamp]

And I—a pronoun slashed. Only on /.

Re:WTF indeed

[Zabu]

And I hadn't seen verb verbified!

Re:Ahem

[melikamp]

I used to think that I could translate most dialects of bullshit into english

Piping TFA to bs2english yields:

Google is a great place to work, and an even better place to invest money in. Go Google! P.S.: buy Google stock.

Re:WTF indeed

[boyko.at.netqos]

I didn't know you could turn "verb" into a verb, or, to verb a noun, verb verb.

Re:WTF indeed

[m.ducharme]

This thread is cromulent.

Re:WTF indeed

[dmbasso]

And I hadn't seen anything, I'm blind you insensitive clod!

Re:Ahem

[ArhcAngel]

I'm not completely retarded.

The data is inconclusive. Let me see what I turn up on a Google search.

Re:Just what we need...

[Eli Gottlieb]

TODAY: Feeling up.

Re:Ahem

[atraintocry]

Science 2.0! Now with more datamining in social networks! And ajax! And of course, the same politicized funding that you know and love.

Re:Data is not paradigm agnostic.

[spun]

One must already have a concept about what is measurable, what to measure, and how to measure it before data can be collected I think the point the article was trying to make is that this idea is now wrong. There are petabytes of already collected data out there. You don't need to have any idea what is measurable, what to measure or how to measure it. You just throw statistical tools at those petabytes of raw data. You don't even need a model. Then magically we find out that vegetarians who wear blue pants on Tuesday and were born in November are more likely to get cancer and should get checked regularly, or something. We don't even need to know why, it's not important. Or at least I think that's what the article was trying to say.

Re:Ahem

[sm62704]

Not all data is created equally. You have to ask how it was collected, according to what rules, and with what purpose

I wear a goatee as a result of a small study.

Several years ago after after my marriage unravelled and I got divorced and couldn't as much as get a dinner date, I decided "fuck it, why do I bother buying razors?" and simply stopped shaving.

Then one night in a bar a woman told me I should shave it into a goatee. So I started asking women "goatee or full beard?" and collecting the binary (y/n) data. Of seventeen randomly selected women aged 21 to 70, sixteen said "goatee". The one who said "full beard" was standing beside her boyfriend, who wore a full beard.

My losing streak ended, thanks to pseudoscience!

Re:Just to clarify

[Kamineko]

"What The Fluff"?

Re:Just to clarify

[ardle]

I fear to think what theory an AI would come up with based on all the "information" that's on the Internet

Re:So...

[backwardMechanic]

Everything possible was researched, measured, logged. Nobody could think what to do with all that data, so they made an extra universe to store it in. We're living in it.

Re:WTF indeed

[FishAdmin]

Actually, it embiggens us all.

Re:Just to clarify

[rugatero]

The second is the Google way: analyse every piece of text in the world,

That should be analyase every piece of text on the Internet , which hampers the next step somewhat:

assume that the majority knows how to spell correctly