Wednesday, 13 October 2010

Will social science change completely?

Seeing the recent post on blog.okcupid.com (Gay Sex vs. Straight Sex) made me think if we are approaching a point where our understanding of society will massively change (hopefully for the good) and where we will get much greater insights in who we are. Is this similar to the era of the invention of the microscope? Things become visible and one does not need to guess anymore?

The amount of data collected on websites is huge - and in many cases the data is probably of very high quality as it matter to people who contributed it (probably higher than what you get with a random questionnaire) . I think this is exciting and looking at some of our project proposals going beyond explicit data collection to implicit data collection may even make this approach stronger (adding another x10 on the new microscopes).