July 02, 2008
THE END OF THEORY: Will the Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete?
From Edge:
Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies. According to Chris Anderson, we are at "the end of science", that is, science as we know it." The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome to the Petabyte Age."
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:02 AM | Permalink
Comments
Correlations do not predictions make, and predictions are what make large parts of science useful. Baring some major breakthrough in the capabilities of AI learning, data shifting does not replace the need for models. Models allow for understanding; correlations allows for, well, correlations, in a sense, nothing more than suspicions.
Models are fundamental, as wrong as they all may be. They give direction and involve deeper understanding. I doubt that very complicated systems could be built out of nothing more than correlated statistics.
For a better dismissal of Anderson's thinking than I can quickly muster, check out this Ars Technica article.
Posted by: Cyrus Hall | Jul 2, 2008 12:19:13 PM
So... the initial idea, as far as I can see, is that we can dispense with the notion of "causality" and rely strictly on correlation.
Well, of course we can. Causation, as Hume showed, is just what we posit when regularities (strong correlations) obtain.
This means that if we want to replace
"predictions based on posited causal relations"
with
"predictions based on computer-generated algorithms"
...we probably can. Computers don't need to posit causality in the world. Our predictive success won't be altered.
However, in order to think we can replace science with such a schema, you'd have to be committed to the idea that a world where masses of humans were simply fed predictions by computers (without being given any idea of why the predictions are successful) would be a world where science was flourishing.
If this strikes you as a world without science, then perhaps there is more to science than prediction...
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Jul 2, 2008 1:48:34 PM
Anderson should not be confused with someone who knows what he's talking about.
Posted by: Cosma | Jul 2, 2008 9:04:57 PM
The String Theorists certainly think so---
More mental masturbation, less scientific method (just elegant math will do)
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Jul 4, 2008 9:25:46 AM
Cosma disagrees:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/581.html
Posted by: internet echo chamber | Jul 4, 2008 7:45:02 PM
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