Why the Cloud Cannot Obscure the Scientific Method

aproposofwhat noted Ars Technica's rebuttal to yesterday's story about "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." The response is titled "Why the cloud cannot obscure the Scientific Method," and is a good follow up to the discussion.

Correlation is not causation

[tist]

A large source of data that has a correlation does not somehow imply causation. Even if it works under some conditions (or even all conditions). The science happens when the causation is determined and then applied.

Nice rebuttal, bad example.

[Angostura]

In general I'm right behind the rebuttal. However John Timmer chooses a very bad real-life example as his rebuttal champion.

He asks: ...would Anderson be willing to help test a drug that was based on a poorly understood correlation pulled out of a datamine? These days, we like our drugs to have known targets and mechanisms of action and, to get there, we need standard science.

These days we may like our drugs to have these attributes, but very often they don't. There are still quite a few medicines around that clearly work and are prescribed on that basis, but for which there is only the haziest evidence as to how exactly they work.

The good thing about the scientific method, however is it gives us a framework to investigate these drug's actions - even if the explanation is still currently beyond us.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[damburger]

Wrong - imply has a very specific meaning to mathematicians and scientists. 'A implies B' means that if A is true, B MUST be true also.

Re:Correlation is not causation

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Hey, don't try to pin all that stuff on mathematicians: the original cloud-gushing author, Chris Anderson, says, "background is in science, starting with studying physics and doing research at Los Alamos. [thelongtail.com]"

Francis Galton and the Ox ...

[frogzilla]

Wasn't this all demonstrated 100 years ago by Francis Galton [wikipedia.org] and an Ox? What's new is that there are more data points and better techniques to identify interesting correlations. Probably this is what we do internally anyway. All of our sensory input is correlated and the interesting bits are filtered out by specific algorithms trained by evolution. What is fascinating to many are the times when these algorithms are spectacularly wrong.