Well, I was about to abandon this as a half-baked thread idea, but I think we drown in a sea of so called "knowledge" these days and being able to filter the deluge would be a very useful thing.
My perspective matches that of [MENTION=9811]Coriolis[/MENTION] quite well...due perhaps, to similar backgrounds. But I did not want to parallel Popper's demarcation of science, but rather something more broad.
Big Data is soon going to pervade so many facets of our lives, and so much so that, I think, will give us a false sense of knowledge. I wanted to a say a little bit more than the aphorism so often repeated that it has become a meaningless platitude, "correlation does not imply causation".
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Also, I think the usual notion of single causes leading to single effects is a woefully inadequate description of causation.
I think a fairly simple decoupling is to note that causal mechanisms are rules that govern time evolution, while the effects and events are simply what happen during the time evolution. In this way, causes and effects are categorically different things. I suppose one can still ask what "caused" the rules. But the rules are not things that need causes. So I think the problem of infinite regress of causes looses its gravity with this conception (even if in some technical sense it is still there).
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One of the predictions about the effects Big Data will have on society is that people have fewer second chances. That society will become more like Sparta, killing off diversity in the name of strength--A sort of Eugenics (but more broad, effecting more areas of our lives).
I was looking for a safeguard, and I thought "corporeal mechanism" was the most natural one. Being careful here to note that even though the mechanistic events all happen in the corporeal world, the "causes" are more abstract rules that we only approximately describe in our conceptions.
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Biochemistry puts back some of the complexity that genetics removes, as does pathology the complexity removed by epidemiology. When forced to tie our models to corporeal entities, we reintroduce some of the quirkiness, the chaos, and the complexity, that statistics tends to whitewash. `
In marketing, we have the
mass market and the
long tail. We may not understand what that long tail is. But we can no longer ignore it, since it is that tail that now wags the dog.
I see two belief systems that are going to collide in possibly violent opposition in our social context. One that aims for the simple, approximate, and efficient, the other that aims for the quirky, the accommodating, and diverse.
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But we know that these systems need not come into violent conflict because they are in great harmony in the simpler aspects of our understanding--namely the understanding of the physical world of things. For me, this is a great sign of hope. That if we can reach this level of understanding, we do not need to chose between efficiency and diversity. We do not need to kill the week to be strong. The pareto principle does not have to be applied. Doors do not need to be slammed. Bridges need not be burnt. Earth need not be scorched.
As things get more complex, it is harder to reach that same balance between efficiency and diversity in our understanding. But, I believe the guiding light can come from finding things that are corporeal and concrete to think about.
I always found it interesting that for most things having to do with "reality" we usually associate with the "left brain" (analysis, collecting data, noting facts). The notable exception being the actual perception of reality, which we attribute to the "right brain". I still remember in art class the idea of perhaps looking at things upside down or at a different angle, so as to see what is actually there rather than our preconception of what is there.
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I thought "Do X, get Y" was the simplest way to see (or perhaps more accurately feel) where the guiding light of corporeal reality is. Because until I have the impulse to do something, I can remain in blissful ignorance with impunity.
Perhaps there is a better approach to this conglomeration of ideas.
This was my attempt to revive the thread by providing the diversity of ideas that drove the question. Perhaps this post will land in the tl;dr category for many of you. But once again, efficiency vs. diversity.
