Google and the end of everything » mathewingram.com/work - The Diigo Meta page

• 01 Jul 08
  

  Roger Chen

  google data mining thinking

  • As I understand it, his argument is that since we have so much data, we can just use algorithms to find correlations in the data, and that will produce as much insight as years of traditional scientific research.
  • think it has a number of serious flaws — and they are all summed up in the title, which implies that having a lot of data and some smart algorithms to sift through it means “the end of the scientific method.” That’s just ridiculous.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • Expanding the amount of data — even exponentially — doesn’t change the fundamental way that the scientific method functions, it just makes it a lot easier to test a hypothesis.
    • And for the record, correlation still doesn’t mean causation, and likely won’t for the foreseeable future. Correlation just means that you found some data that shares some kind of relationship with other data; it can help suggest causation, but it doesn’t replace it.

Would you like to comment?

Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.