The Disruptive Concept of Big Data

Big data has now begun to gradually change our lives. Big data has brought us three subversive conceptual changes: all data, not random sampling; general direction, not precise guidance; correlation, not Causal relationship. Not random samples, but all data: In the era of big data, we can analyze more data, and sometimes even process all the data related to a particular phenomenon, instead of relying on random sampling (random sampling, we used to This is often taken for granted as a limitation, but high-performance digital technology has made us realize that it is actually an artificial limitation); not precision, but complexity: there are so many research data that we No more obsession with precision; there was little data to analyze before, so we had to quantify our records as precisely as possible, and as we scale, the obsession with precision diminishes; with big data, we no longer We need to get to the bottom of a phenomenon, as long as we grasp the general direction of development, properly ignoring the accuracy at the micro level will give us better insight at the macro level; not causality, but correlation: we no longer We are keen on finding causality, which has been a long-standing habit of human beings. In the era of big data, we no longer need to focus on the causal relationship between things, but should look for the correlation between things; correlation may not be able to accurately tell Why does something happen to us, but it reminds us that it is happening.