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: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....

Re:WTF indeed

[mrchaotica]

adjective-ised

And I hadn't seen adjective verbed!

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: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.

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 ;)

Re:WTF indeed

[melikamp]

And I—a pronoun slashed. Only on /.

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: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: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:It depends

[Wandering Wombat]

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

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: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:It depends

[Hijacked Public]

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