The End of Theory

There is something seductive about this idea: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

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.

There's a little voice back here that says it has something to do with complexity turned inside out.

So far we have tended to think of complexity as an emergent property of many iterating simple actions that affect each other in ways that become massively unpredictable and to believe that we can manage this process by selectively tuning some of those small iterating modules.

Its a deconstructive approach that has worked pretty well for science and a lot of other stuff we do, but it doesn't deal, for example, with how we learn a handle language. So what happens if the google-isation of data has reached a point where we can take a language learning approach to almost anything.

We all live, with varying degrees of success, within highly complex sets of relationships, both within and the fact is that we deal directly with that complexity but just at a completely unconscious level, as soon as we try to explain how we do it we wind up with Derrida, nausea and hallucinations (all merely different aspects of the same thing)

What if Chris Anderson is even 51% right?

Comments

[gregory]

now comes the time where a knowledge of mysticism is having some importance, the unquantifiable knowledge of consciousness will be my definition for that ... just to be able to relate all objectivity with all objectivity still changes nothing about thew subject, the knower ... just the changing weather of mindstuff