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.
well, he’s right about significance, in the sense that the power goes up as sample size increases. but on the other hand, he does says “Davos” an awful lot.
The huge amount of data that they collected for the Higgs made it possible to detect a very tiny bump, and so the resolution increased with the volume. But that bump became more significant _as opposed to_ all the noise around it. I’m arguing that the noise doesn’t become significant no matter how high the resolution, you just get more noise. I’m more appalled by his nonchalant confidence that collecting data will magically provide answers for society and that the questions asked will take care of themselves. I also admit that I am tired of ‘big ideas’ being presented as valid research based on academic chicken-feathers.
What is it with people refusing to see human nature as part of nature and therefore to that extent self organizing (and self destroying)? I think that even if they could process every bit that exists on the human map that it would ever stop the vast majority of us from being batshit crazy. We can’t even be sure what batshit crazy is – especially if the batshityness is coming from our own minds (collective and individually).
I need to read the entirety of the article you mention though – I wonder if his mind is going along with the current trend of people to see human life as a big video game and that we are all just parts of the video game. Maybe he will be a Tron like messiah and lead all of our twittering minds – and – bodies, to a better and more organized hell.
“I need to read the entirety of the article you mention though”
To be fair he’s at a futurist convention. Everybody there is pumped with enthusiasm of the religious kind. They are the Solvers of Problems and (so long as they are allowed to define the problems) they are going to kick some ass. Perhaps in quiet moments away from funding bodies and the need to publish he’s shaking his head at the way that article came out.