Stilgherrian writes:
The last time I wrote about big data, in July, I called it a big, distracting bubble. But it’s worse than that. Big data is an ideology. A religion. One of its most important gospels is, of course, at Wired.
In 2008, Chris Anderson talked up a thing called The Petabyte Age in The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method 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,” he wrote.
Declaring the scientific method dead after 2,700 years is quite a claim. Hubris, even. But, Anderson wrote, “There’s no reason to cling to our old ways.” Oh, OK then.
Read more on ZDNet.