Thanks to Geoff McGovern for pointing us toward a fascinating essay in Wired. Chris Anderson posits that the accessibility of information has vaulted us into what he calls the Petrabyte Age, in which
information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional
taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls
for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the
tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It
forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for
it later.
Given how much data is readily available, Anderson continues, "[w]e can
analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show." The
scientific method encourages us to explain what we know about the world
and make greater generalizations about the rest of it that we have not
observed; but if we can observe everything, essentially, it seems that
generalizations are no longer necessary. We don’t need to guess about
what the world might look like, because an hour in front of the
computer can tell us.
More after the jump.