• @la_taupe
    La Taupe PUBLIC DOMAIN

    ▻http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory

    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.

    La Taupe PUBLIC DOMAIN
    • @erratic
      schrödinger

      The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete (Chris Andreesen, 2007)

      Article states the end of the need to establish theories, as it is being replaced by computational heuristics. There is no longer a need to interpret phenomenae, as it can be statistically deduced from the massive amounts of data.

      This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

      [...]

      faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete

      [...]

      The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.

      #wired
      #big_data
      #google
      #scientific_theory

      schrödinger
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