The 4 unique powers of Big Data

From The Economist review of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz ::

Modern microeconomics, sociology, political science and quantitative psychology all depend to a large extent on surveys of at most a few thousand respondents. In contrast, he says, there are “four unique powers of Big Data”: it provides new sources of information, such as pornographic searches; it captures what people actually do or think, rather than what they choose to tell pollsters; it enables researchers to home in on and compare demographic or geographic subsets; and it allows for speedy randomised controlled trials that demonstrate not just correlation but causality. As a result, he predicts, “the days of academics devoting months to recruiting a small number of undergraduates to perform a single test will come to an end.” In their place, “the social and behavioural sciences are most definitely going to scale,” and the conclusions researchers will be able to reach are “the stuff of science, not pseudoscience”.