Why the Cloud Cannot Obscure the Scientific Method

aproposofwhat noted Ars Technica's rebuttal to yesterday's story about "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." The response is titled "Why the cloud cannot obscure the Scientific Method," and is a good follow up to the discussion.

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Data Deluge Since Davinci

[Doc Ruby]

Leonardo Davinci is reputed to be the last person who "knew everything" that there was to know during their lifetime. Even that wasn't true. But the scientific method has been the key to both creating and coping with a "data deluge".

Science suffers when there's too little data: scientists then must generate more by observation, or do something else that isn't science (and doesn't work nearly as well). Too much data is only a problem if you're willing to settle for imprecise/inaccurate results. I'm sure there are a lot more lazy scientists than since Leonardo's time, just with the inflation of the scientist population, but that doesn't mean we should dumb down scientists who just want to own a computer that spits out answers to the data they put in.