"Big Data" and human nature

In recent times, "Big data" has become the hottest concept in the entrepreneurial circle.

People have been leaving all kinds of traces to the world, sunrise and sunset, and the blood, the endless, the nations clamor, Gaoxiapinghu Pinghu; Huaqianyuexia, love and hate, so many.

With the advent of the Internet in the era of broadband, social networks and smartphones become more popular, many of the preferences of people are recorded in the form of data: Like reading books, like music, yearning place, people who want to be friends ... This is accompanied by a prolonged period of time when people are online, and the data is growing at a rate that humans cannot imagine, so that the analysis of the data can restore the human being.

What's more tempting is that people can predict the unknown by analyzing a lot of data, which breeds amazing http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/12183.html "> Business opportunities."

It doesn't just happen in America. A Chinese company is grabbing data from social media and predicting the box office by analysis, according to the media cloud technology.

It selects 30 parameters for the movie, chooses 50 parameters for the actor, including where to grow up, the graduation school and the time, the role played, the ratings and the box office, the gossip, the relationship, and the netizen evaluation. Based on these parameters, the company predicts that the movie "1942" will be 380 million at a loss. Huayi thinks it is "black", but the final box office is really only 360 million.

The most interesting thing behind the whole story is the "seemingly bizarre" parameters chosen by people. It is known that these parameters are related to the results to be predicted, but they do not know how to relate. In other words, people can only know what "is" and don't Know "why".

Schoenberg, author of the Big Data age, says predictions based on relational analysis are "the core of large data analysis". He claims that by exploring "what" is the relationship, not "why", can help people better understand the world.

To support this conclusion, the authors cite a number of successful business cases: two of the things that do not see a causal relationship are related to each other, and the research and calculation of both are sufficient to uncover huge business opportunities.

The author acknowledges that this concept is contrary to "common sense", after all, people want to understand the world through causal relationship. Is it true that the relationship is more important than causation? Do the investors, entrepreneurs and even government officials who say "big data" today really know what this means?

Interestingly, while the big Data age introduced the concept to China, the three authors of its Chinese version showed three different attitudes. Tian The grand expression of the "broadband revolution" he advocated many years ago, the "Big data" and the prosperity of the country associated, completely ignored the "big data analysis of the core" this problem; Chinese Internet practitioners and thinkers Xie is aware of this, but the issue "left to scholars to study slowly", advocating "big data "It can indeed" create great economic or social benefits ", but the translator Zhou disagree with Schoenberg, fear to abandon the pursuit of causality, is to abandon the human intellectual superiority over the computer, is human self-indulgence and depravity.

Professor Zhou's concerns are at least commendable. As one of the introductions and advocates of the concept of "big data", he has neither eaten alive the newest import nor treated it with complete utilitarianism, and I believe everyone remembers the scene of "Blue Sea" and "long tail" in the past few years.

If Chinese practitioners flock to "big data" on the one hand and are indifferent to the core of the concept, what kind of business innovation they will bring is worrying. As one investor at the company that has invested in the analysis of the movie box office said: "Programmers don't understand social rules, they have to learn sociology."

The subtitle of the book "The Big Data Age" is "the big change of life, work and thinking". However, for a philosopher or a scholar who cares about the evolution of human thought, his idea is at best a return or a reflection, not a "big change" at all.

There are many kinds of related relationships in the world, and human beings name one of them as causal relationships. Human beings have spiritual freedom, so although he is in a finite space-time, it can be as if in the eternal, in time and space in a series of events to reorder. For example, the incident occurred in the previous thought is the reason, the subsequent things that are the result, but also in accordance with their own understanding, the simultaneous occurrence of a series of events identified as the reason. This is the light of human reason.

After the rise of humanism, people have an optimistic spirit, believe that people's rationality is accurate and reliable, and single through rationality can establish a set of knowledge of the real (reali-ty) accurate and unified. If this is possible, everything that happens to people in the universe, and all the things and ideas of man, can be satisfactorily explained.

This idea was originally a hypothetical or philosophical, but people accept it without thinking, and there seems to be a causal relationship between everything in the world, and the world becomes a closed mechanical system, as the naturalist believes, that God created a precise system, and then whatever, The world operates according to the law of cause and effect. The causal relationship was applied only to physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and later, the mechanistic causal relationship ruled psychology, sociology, and the human self.

Schoenberg said, "If every decision or idea we make is the result of something else, and the result is caused by other reasons, then there is no human will, and all life is controlled by causation." In this way, life is in a causal cycle toward the inevitable end, the love between people, the meaning of life can not affect the closed system, and therefore meaningless.

Each person's heart shows that people and animals are different, always need love, warmth, meaning. When people face suffering, the explanation of karma can only let them fear, anger, unbearable. Only the light of reason, without the heat of emotion, is not a whole man, but an advanced machine with destructive power.

Professor Zhou need not worry too much, if the analysis of data in the large data age, it can make the people excessively addicted to the causal relationship to the world, but also to the human self have a more open interpretation, it is undoubtedly meaningful. If the human pursuit of causality is too extreme, the love, meaning and the ability to think beyond time are completely obliterated, which actually degrades the human self and becomes a part of the mechanical nature, which is the "degeneration" of mankind.

This is not just something philosophers care about. Chinese investors and entrepreneurs are salivating over the business prospects of social media in the big data age. They found that Zuckerberg's success may have been in his psychology at Harvard, and they realised that social media can "embody, magnify and change" human nature, and that users willingly follow their own path, they need to understand human nature.

Because of the baptism of Christian faith, Western thought has a relatively complete "human theory": people have spiritual freedom and nobility, but the human is limited, far from the center of the universe, the need for humility, people are related to each other needs, these concepts are already implied in the culture of the premise. Schoenberg, for example, advocates that large data analysis is a sharp weapon, but at the end of the book it is still a reminder that the big data is not a "cold world filled with algorithms and machines", and human instincts, risk-taking, surprises and mistakes are still important, and when using the tools of large data "we should be humble, mindful of the nature of humanity."

In the great age of social media, the user experience has never been more important. This experience is far from the UI design so simple, every social media user first is human, what is the person? What is special about people compared to things? At the same time, to meet the needs of users will not only stimulate the physical desires, but also will include respect, attention, compassion, compassion and many other unseen but existing needs.

This is a huge challenge in our country, which is still regarded only as a factor of production and as a resource consumer. For the steaming, brutal growth of the Chinese Internet industry, the "human nature" of this seemingly non-commercial concept of grasp, should determine the fate of many companies.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)