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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?"
That an incredible amount of data exists on any given topic does nothing to describe relationships, causality, precision, accuracy, distribution, correlation, or anything else. Data is information, and information must be processed in order to make it meaningful. Additionally, everything that's written, printed, published, etc, is not necessarily true, accurate, precise, etc.
If anything, the Google phenomenon demands more rigorous examination by accepted methods.
The preceding message has been brought to you by Captain Obvious and the letters O,R,L,Y.
Each claim the others data is unsound by the paradigm's umbrella it falls under.
No, each claim the other's theory is wrong.
Nobody (sane) refutes the existence of ring species, or refutes microevolution, or other observable forms of data. The only thing in dispute in the controversy is "species are species because they were made that way" versus "species are species because after some really big N evolutionary steps they become that way".
If your methodology for evaluating a theory requires classifying it by abstract metaphysical concepts like "natural" and "supernatural", then you're a step away from the scientific method of "experiment".