End of Models

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now search engines are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies. Now they call it clouds.

The Petabyte Age is now challenging all boundaries. The biggest and the scariest victim of the Petabyte age is Theory. Anderson in his book The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete sums it up: "This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves."

The often quoted phrase, "Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful", is attributed to George Box one of the most influential statisticians of the 20th century and a pioneer in the areas of quality control, time series analysis, design of experiments and Bayesian inference. It now seems a rude reality as all modeling will be challenged by the statistic spewing Cloud of the Petabyte Age.

The royal road would be to demonstrate that models are crucial to science, which would be grounds for thinking that they are logically necessary. Timmer takes the short cut on pragmatic grounds: models have utility, regardless of their truth or falsity. Models, so to speak, make the scientific establishment go around.