Doubts About Big Data
March 13, 2013
More skepticism is in the air over big-data hype. ReadWrite’s Matt Asay cites a recent dustup between a New York Times reporter and Tesla Motors‘ head honcho Elon Musk in, “Tesla and the Fallacy of Data-Driven Decisions.” Reporter John Broder had given the Tesla Model S a scathing review, with which Musk took issue. In the end, both parties effectively supported their arguments using Broder’s test-drive data. Who was right? Even after looking at that data, it is hard to say; and that is the problem.
Asay asserts that the value of big data lies in pointing us in the right direction, not in employing it to prove points and draw conclusions. He writes:
“New York Times columnist David Brooks nails this in an op-ed piece, wherein he argues that Big Data, while very useful for guiding our intuitions, gets some things very wrong. Like the value of social connections. Or the context for answering a question. In fact, he speculates, Big Data might actually obscure Big Answers by complicating decisions and making it even harder to determine which statistically significant correlations between data are informative and not simply spurious.”
The new big-data industry made for a $4.5 billion market in 2010, but is projected to hit $23.8 billion in 2016. Is all this growth just a house of cards?
Not necessarily, but it is important to recognize what data can and cannot do. Analysis software can find patterns and draw preliminary conclusions, but human minds are still better at higher-order thinking. (And I hope they always will be.)
Cynthia Murrell, March 13, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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