Mind Boggling Stupidity

This piece of utter retar­da­tion just popped up on my radar; and, after a solid round of bash­ing my head against my key­board, I was com­pelled to com­ment. The short ver­sion is, Chris Anderson at Wired is mak­ing the argu­ment that the avail­abil­ity of enor­mous clouds of data will allow sci­en­tists to eschew the sci­en­tific method and just pull con­clu­sions from cor­re­la­tions within “the cloud.”  His main argu­ment for this, Google doesn’t have a proper model of why PageRank works, but it does so, there you go.

Ars Technica pro­vides a bet­ter rebut­tal of the sci­en­tific points that I feel like writ­ing; so I highly sug­gest that you read that. But I do have some com­ments I’d like to make.

To start, why, for the love of Ahura Mazda, must every Web 2.0 dork con­flate Google with the rest of the gods damned uni­verse. First, Google is an adver­tis­ing com­pany, noth­ing more, noth­ing less. The sooner you nerds real­ize that every­thing that comes out of Google Labs is directed at cre­at­ing a pool of eyes to view those ads, the less dis­ap­pointed you’ll be when real­ity comes crash­ing down. Second, Google’s suc­cess is a result of mar­ket forces. Take a good look at the bull­shit that most econ­o­mists spew regard­ing those and you’ll see, “the mar­ket” is about as related to actual sci­ence as Intelligent Design. Third, I have never seen a cred­i­ble piece of research that sup­ports the the­ory that Google’s algo­rithms are actu­ally bet­ter at pro­vid­ing rel­e­vant results that any­one else’s. The fact that Google con­sis­tently ranks Wikipedia at or near the top of the results for most searches cer­tainly shows that “accu­racy” sure as hell ain’t part of the algorithm.

The sec­ond thing about Anderson’s piece that draws my ire is, unfor­tu­nately, a phe­nom­e­non that is as old as recorded his­tory (which is ironic as we’ll see in a minute). This is the fer­vent belief of the mem­bers of each new social or philo­soph­i­cal move­ment that their par­tic­u­lar phi­los­o­phy or credo, or tech­ni­cal spe­cialty is a) applic­a­ble to the world at large, and b) going to super­sede all that came before it. You see this all the time in the Web 2.0/Social Media/Free Software com­mu­ni­ties. Wikipedia will remove the need for tra­di­tional, expert com­piled, ency­clo­pe­dias. A crappy lap­top with “Free” soft­ware will deliver enlight­en­ment to the starv­ing masses of Africa. MySpace/FaceBook/FlavorOfTheMonth will replace the need to meet peo­ple in the real world and enable peo­ple to con­nect on an unprece­dented global level.

Sorry guys, you’re wrong on all counts. True, there have been moments in his­tory when a new phi­los­o­phy or tech­nol­ogy has actu­ally changed the world. The great exper­i­ment in par­tic­i­pa­tory democ­racy started here in the United States in 1776 is one. The inven­tion of the print­ing press is another. And, iron­i­cally given the piece that started this rant, the ele­va­tion of the Scientific Method above super­sti­tion dur­ing the Enlightenment is another.

Here’s the sim­ple truth for all you nerds out there who think that you’re about to “change the world.” The Internet could be wiped off the face of the planet tomor­row; and the world will trun­dle along just fine. I know that’s hard to accept, but it’s true. So fuck­ing deal with it.

Addendum:

Well, crap. If I had remem­bered that this was Chris “The Long Tail Explains Fucking Everything” Anderson I could have stopped there.