Gustible - under the rubric of [$_SELF]

A recent article by Wired’s Chris Anderson, entitled the “End of Theory”, has sparked more than one refutation in the blogosphere. Even though the article is almost certainly somewhat breathless in its announcement of the end of the scientific method, it served to bring a very important fact to the attention of a wide audience. That fact is this: the deluge of data that is being generated in the connected age, brings new possibilities to the scientific method, and offers means of validating models that have never been available before.

Rather than signalling the end of theory, the petabyte age signals the start of an era where models of behaviour can be verified using actual data. For the first time the sociological sciences may be studied empirically because there are very large amounts of data available – a great deal of which has been generated through activities related to social interaction.

An interesting aspect of the “End of Theory” article, is the revelation that Google managed to implement the planet’s most successful ad-serving methodology without having to know anything at all about sociology. Although certainly true, it obscures the important fact that the data not only makes it possible to extrapolate, but also to understand. If Google had been interested in studying the causes of social behaviour, rather than profiting from the consequence of such behaviour, the data would likely have lent itself to this.

The sheer volume of data that is being generated, will allow social theoreticians to mine the information in a way similar to that in which physicists mine data obtained from particle accelerators. Theories may be validated by searching for evidence in empirical data, and new theories will be constructed based on the stories the data tell.

This is the start of an age where new scientific disciplines may be discovered by observing things we have never before been able to observe. Much in the spirit of Asimov’s Foundation series, the mathematics of human behaviour may finally become a reality. The “End of Theory” ? Hardly. More likely the start of it.