Chris Anderson suggests that it’s time to chuck the scientific method in favor of a new methodology that serves up facts the way Google serves up ads — through calculations on massive sets of data:

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the “beautiful story” phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don’t know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

I think there’s a lot to be learned from statistical analysis of data in the cloud, but I’m not sure that theory and models can be put away so quickly. There has to be a framework of questions we are asking, and we need to interpret the data once we have it. The theory may be moved to the algorithms or the interpretive methodology, but it still has to be in there somewhere.

The other night on the podcast, I asked whether there is an advantage to having a bleak outlook on the future. I believe that there have been some historical advantages to having a negative outlook, but that the advantage has been variable throughout human evolution –sometimes you get a boost from being a pessimist, sometimes from being an optimist. But seeing as life was riskier in the short term for our ancestors, the more risk-averse pessimistic outlook took hold. We developed a natural fear of the future not too unlike our natural fear of the other.

In an evolutionary context, fear of the other is not necessarily a bad thing. If we’re talking about Homo Sapiens vs. Neanderthals or (earlier on) mammals vs. reptiles, an innate revulsion to the threatening other served to keep evolution moving in the right direction. Back then. Today, we need our fear of the other a lot less than we used to. I think it kicks in correctly if, say, you come home and find a stranger in your bedroom. But a “fear” of other cultures, races, religions, lifestyle choices, etc. is not helpful, notwithstanding the fact that major cultural artifacts, lets call them memeplexes, have been developed around this fear. These we know as xenophobia, ethnocentrism, racism, and other delights.

Today we recognize that basic animal instinct as one that we need to control, and the memeplexes that developed around it as not only unhelpful, but morally wrong. What, then, about that closely related animal instinct, our natural fear of the future? Again, it was a fairly useful guide back in the days when human life was one unbroken chain of existential threats. Back when we needed to find prey or starve, avoid predators or be eaten, stay out of the flood plain or drown, keep warm at night or freeze to death, and so on, a healthy fixation on everything that could go wrong and an expectation that many such things would go wrong was key to survival.