It’s dead, Jim!
posted in Computers, Philosophy, Pop Culture, Science |The scientific method, that is. Theories? We don’t need no steenkin’ theories, man! Hypotheses? Pish-tush! Soooo 20th century! Experimentation? Observation? Oh, puh-leeze! Who needs that stuff? ‘Cause we’ve got data.
Gigabytes of data. Terrabytes of data. Petabytes. Hexadeca-bytes. Google-bytes, even! (But not Google™ type bytes.) Infini-bytes! We have data pouring out our ears these days, thanks to the Intertubes, and so Wired Magazine has declared The End Of The Scientific Method.
‘Cause, y’see, we can take all that data, put it in a big Magic Data Mangler, shake it, stir it, decant it, and ta-da! New science! All these nifty correlations will spill out, neat science-y goodness just spread in front of us like a field of diamonds, sparkling and glittering and making us gasp at the magic of it all. Kozmik All knows it’s much easier to do that than to, say, oh…think. Who needs to look at the world and wonder "why?" or "how?" or "what would happen if we did x?"
I’m sure OmegaBro will be glad to know he doesn’t need to go traipsing off to all his field sites any more. Why bother to investigate what happens to sawfly galls on southwestern stream willows in flood years versus in dry years? Why spend your time counting galls on specific trees at specific sites each year? I’m sure that information is out there in the interwebs cloud, just floating around, waiting for dear OmegaBro to write the proper program to collect it, stir, shake, and spill, and voila, he will have his community ecology interactions down to a "T".
Of course, there’s that silly little thing like, oh, deciding what to mine from the vast cloud of info out there. And why.
As someone commented on the essay, "garbage in, garbage out"–that grand old saying about computers and data–applies here. Given how infested the web is with spam and commercialism and outright crankery, using the "just grab all the data out there and whirl it around in some big-ass computers" approach might deposit a lovely fewmet of, say, colonics cleansing being effective at removing years-old parasites from poor haggard human bodies. Or someone might use it to prove that Indigo Children really are an increasing influence on world politics today.
Lots of other folks have said it, but I’ll say it, too: Theory is not dead. The scientific method is not passe. The Wired essay is waving its hand at statistical correlation being science, all gee-gosh-golly-wow charts-n-graphs. But that’s not science. It’s cool, yes, I’ll grant that. And lots of interesting information is coming out of the expanding ability to correlate disparate groups of data and seeing what patterns emerge. But science is asking "why?", trying to figure out the natural world, trying to understand underlying laws that drive the universe, delving into genetics and fossils and tokamaks and outer space and multi-dimensional math and gravity and thermonuclear processes that make stars burn bright…
All that kind of stuff.
Y’see, the information mining that Wired is going gaga over has–as its very basis–human beings who explored the world and teased out important basics based on theories, based on thousands of years of human beings asking questions, posing hypotheses, testing them out, deciding what works and what doesn’t, and why it works that way and not another, and how to harness the way it works to make life easier (or more complex) for humanity. And it requires humans asking "why?" and wanting to know the answer to even decide to make the Magic Data Manglers look at one particular set of data in particular, before the MDM spills out its oh-so-pretty correlations.
So I have to say, the scientific method–theory, hypotheses, testing, experimentation, revision–is not dead yet; it’s not the red-shirted Away-Team member who always bites the dust in any Star Trek episode.
