Here's a recent post on Andrew Gelman's blog. Gelman is a real big deal in stats, probability. This piece on the promise (or lack thereof) of Big Data seems to me to represent a turning of the zeitgeist. A while ago Big Data was going to solve every problem. Now, things are moving more cautiously. There's nothing wrong with data and nothing wrong with lots of it. But, it's no substitute for thought and it brings its own problems with it. Here's hoping the hype has peaked.
That post is one of the rare non-Gelmna posts, as it happens. Not that this means anything with respect to the content, only that the bigness of Gelman's deal in stats and probability is here vicarious.
ReplyDeleteBeing either a syntactician shanghaied into Big Data :) or a Big Dataist (I can't abide the term "data scientist", it gives me hives to use it non-ironically) who sneaks out occasionally to talk syntax, I would say that alas the hype will take some long time yet to peak. It's too tempting.
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