@[email protected] @[email protected] Compare and contrast:
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.
-- Chris Anderson (2008). The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, WIRED magazine (speaking of Cory Doctorow 🙄)
and:
Big Data opens up the prospect of absolute knowledge. Everything can be measured and quantified; the things of the world reveal correlations that were previously hidden. Even human behaviour is supposed to admit exact prediction. A new age of insight is being announced. Correlations are replacing causality. That’s-how-it-is stands where How so? once wavered.
Hegel, the philosopher of Spirit, would deem the omniscience (All-Wissen) that Big Data promises to be absolute ignorance (Un-Wissen). Knowledge becomes possible only at the level of the Concept: ‘The Concept dwells within the things themselves, it is that through which they become what they are, and to comprehend an object means therefore to become conscious of its concept.’ Only from the all-comprehending Concept C is complete comprehension (Begreifen) of the correlation between A and B possible. In contrast, Big Data affords only extremely rudimentary knowledge, that is, correlations in which nothing is comprehended. Big Data lacks comprehension – it lacks the Concept – and thus it lacks Spirit. The absolute knowledge intimated by Big Data coincides with absolute ignorance. (emphasis mine!)
-- Byung-Chul Han (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Verso Books
Not to mention Plato v. the Sophists and rhetoricians (Protagoras + Gorgias), which my wife, a classicist, evokes whenever I rant about this stuff.
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ
Anthony
SnoopJ