The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
Illustration: Marian Bantjes
"All models are wrong, but some are useful."
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
Mais
Veja também:
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/die-digital-debatte/wie-die-wissenschaft-das-nachdenken-verlernt-14059183-p7.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_7
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So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.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
Mais
Veja também:
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/die-digital-debatte/wie-die-wissenschaft-das-nachdenken-verlernt-14059183-p7.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_7
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