Is this guy talking a bunch of horse shit? It sure sounds like it.

He is one of the most-cited computer scientists in the world and was named by Forbes as one of the world’s seven most powerful data scientists.

Well hush my puppies. A bad smell emanates when he says this:

The data is so big that any question you ask about it will usually have a statistically significant answer. This means, strangely, that the scientific method as we normally use it no longer works, because almost everything is significant!

Actually, wait… no, increasing the amount of data doesn’t do that. Statistical significance doesn’t have an upper threshold. What does he mean by ‘big’ here? The data is so ‘big’… that word is doing some sleight of hand. Does it mean amount or complexity or … magic.

This is the first time in human history that we have the ability to see enough about ourselves that we can hope to actually build social systems that work qualitatively better than the systems we’ve always had.

That’s a Big Science claim that goes all the way back to the 17th century. {Recent technology paradigm} will scientise society and we will all be perfected! The guy that punched the first card was there, along with Better Living Through Chemistry and Communism Is Electricity.

Bullwinkle the Moose has found a new hat!

The fact that we can now begin to actually look at the dynamics of social interactions and how they play out…

Ah here we go. Always look for the assertion of ‘Truth’ or ‘Fact’. So what I see is the Dynamics of Social Interactions being defined to fit the ruler we have to look at measure it. Five units of Dynamics of Social Interactions please. Or let’s just say DSI units with Tweets as the coinage. That’s one way to take a complex reality and by careful slicing of the difficult bits turn it into something that makes an elegant formula. Like the pseudoscience of Jaques Lacan, there is an appeal here to the magic of complexity with an promise that it can be tamed into epicycles.

OK so it takes a few reads to get the swing of it but I think I have Mr. MIT Centre for Connection Science pinned on my butterfly chart.

We’re going to reinvent what it means to have a human society.

Human society is not something that will engineered by this guy any more than the engineers that came before. To a man carrying a hammer every problem looks like a nail. For Freud the human mind was a steam engine, and for this guy society is a giddy number of microtransactions. Always, always remember the World’s Fair (Orphic) rule – Eros and Thanatos, wine and music.

Still searching for a place where expansive thought can float my mind. edge.org doesn’t look like it’s going to be it.