Originally Posted by Mark Chu-Carroll

There's a tiny grain of truth to the article. Massive quantities of data and the tools to analyze that data do change science... But the idea that massive scale data collection and computing renders the scientific method obsolete? That we no longer need models, or theories, or experiments? That's blatant silliness.

Originally Posted by Mark Chu-Carroll

Mr. Andersen mentions Google, and the fact that we don't know why our search algorithms produce particular results for a particular query. That's absolutely true. Do a search for a particular set of keywords, and we can't, without a lot of work, figure out just why our algorithms produced that result. That doesn't mean that we don't understand our search. Each component of the search process is well understood and motivated by some real theory of how to discover information from links. The general process is well understood; the specific results are a black box. Mr. Anderson is confusing the fact that we don't know what the result will be for a particular query with the idea that we don't know why our system works well.