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Peter Norvig, Google's research director, offered an update to George Box's maxim: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.

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.

What can science learn from Google?

This kind of thinking is poised to go mainstream.

Whenever you talk about numbers and statistics, use graphics.

Give me more things to read. In your posts, sometimes you mention things that are related to the topic, but you don’t want to develop more. Link them to a place where I can read more about them,

Whenever you link to another blog post or website, use strong, descriptive text anchors.

Create blog post sections and use subheadings so that I can jump between paragraphs of interest.