Big data from a human perspective

During this time, "big data" has become the hottest concept in the industry.

People have been leaving the world a variety of traces of the sunrise and sunset, and interest; blood multiply, endless, noisy country, high Gap Lake; before the moon, love and hate, so all.

As the Internet enters the broadband era, the popularity of social networks and smartphones has led to many of the preferences of people being recorded in the form of data: like reading books, favorite music, longing for places, people willing to be friends ... and accompanying Is the continuous extension of people online duration, the data growth rate of human unimaginable, so that people found that the analysis of these data can restore the people themselves.

Even more attractive is the fact that one can predict the unknown by analyzing large amounts of data, which will give birth to amazing business opportunities.

It does not happen in the United States. From the media "cloud technology" said that a Chinese company is crawling social media from various data, through the analysis to predict the box office.

It selects 30 parameters for the movie, selects 50 parameters for the actor, including where to grow up, graduation school and time, the role played, ratings and box office, what kind of sex scandal, who is good, who evaluation, etc. . According to these parameters, the company predicted the movie "1942" at the box office is 380 million, will lose money. Huayi think they are "black" them, but the final box office really only 360 million.

The most interesting thing behind the whole thing is the "weird" parameters people choose. People know that these parameters are related to the result to be predicted, but are not sure how "related." In other words, people only know what is "what" and do not know "why."

Schoenberg, author of The Big Data Age, said predictions built on correlation analysis are "at the core of big data analytics." He claims that by exploring what is "what" or "related" rather than "why," we can help people better understand the world.

In support of this conclusion, the author cites a number of successful business cases: two do not see the causal relationship between the two are related to each other, both research and computing enough to find tremendous business opportunities.

The author admits that this concept runs counter to "common sense," after all, people want to understand the world through causal relationships. Are the judgments really relevant for causal relationships, and are investors, entrepreneurs, and even government officials who say "big data" today really know what that means?

Interestingly, while the concept of big data was introduced into China, the three Chinese authors of the preamble showed three different attitudes. Tian continued his grand expression he advocated "the broadband revolution" many years ago when he linked "big data" with the prosperity of the country and completely ignored the "core of big data analysis." The Internet practitioners and thinkers in China Xie Wen is aware of this, but this issue "for scholars to study slowly," advocating "big data" can indeed "create huge economic or social benefits"; only the translator Zhou Tao disagrees with Schoenberg, The fear of giving up on the pursuit of causality is to renounce the intellectual superiority of humankind over the computer, human self-indulgence and depravity.

Professor Zhou Tao's concerns are at least commendable. As one of the importers and advocates of the concept of "big data," he did not devour or exploit this newest imported product nor did he treat it with a full utilitarian attitude. He believed that he was full of "blue ocean" and " Long tail "scene remember it fresh.

If Chinese practitioners, on the one hand, flock to Big Data and are indifferent to the core behind the concept, what kind of business innovation they come up with is worrying. As an investor in the data firm that invested in the box office analyzing the movie said: "Programmers do not understand social rules and want to learn sociology."

The subtitle of The Big Data Era is "a big revolution in life, work, and thinking." However, for a philosopher or a scholar who cares about the evolution of human thought, his conception at best is merely a regression or reflection, completely out of "great transformation."

There are many kinds of related things in human beings, and one of them is named causality. Mankind has the spiritual freedom, so although he is in a limited space-time, he can seem to be re-ordering a series of events in time and space in eternity. For example, think of the events that preceded them as the reasons, the subsequent ones as the results, and one of the series of simultaneous occurrences as their own understanding. This is the light of human reason.

After the rise of the trend of humanism, people have an optimistic spirit, believing that human reason is accurate and reliable, and that an accurate and unified knowledge of reali-ty can be established through rationality alone. If this is possible, everything human beings in the universe encounter, and all things and thoughts of man, can be satisfactorily explained.

The above concept was originally a hypothetical or philosophical one, but one accepted it without thinking. As a result, there seemed to be only a causal relationship between the things in the world, and the world became a closed mechanical system, just as deism As God thought, God created a sophisticated system, and then no matter what, the world operates according to the laws of causality. The original causal relationship was only used in the fields of physics, astronomy and chemistry. Later, this mechanical causality also ruled psychology and sociology and ruled human beings themselves.

Schoenberg said: "If every decision or idea that we make is the result of other things, and the result is caused by other reasons, so that the cycle of reciprocation, then there is no human will to say that all Are just controlled by the causal relationship. "Thus, life is an inevitable end in a cycle of causality, and love between people and the meaning of life can not affect the closed system, so it is meaningless.

Everyone's heart shows that people and beasts are different and always need love, warmth and meaning. When people face misery, the explanation of karma should only make them fearful, angry and unbearable. Only the light of reason, without the heat of emotion, is not an entire person, but a high-level machinery with destructive power.

Professor Zhou Tao need not worry too much. If the big data era, computer analysis of the data can make people overly addicted to causation to the world, in fact, have a more open explanation to mankind himself, which undoubtedly makes sense. If humankind's pursuit of causality goes too far, the exclusive love, the meaning, the thinking ability beyond time, and so on are totally obliterated. In fact, they just demean ourselves and make human beings a part of the mechanics. This is the "fall of mankind."

This is not just a concern for philosophers. Chinese investors and entrepreneurs all covet the business prospects that social media in the big data era show. They found that perhaps Zuckerberg's success was that he studied psychology at Harvard; they realized that social media "embodies, amplifies, and alters" human nature, and that users are willing to follow them and that they need to understand human nature .

Due to the baptism of Christian faith, there is a relatively complete "theory of human beings" in Western thought: human beings have spiritual freedom and dignity, but people are limited, far from the center of the universe, they need to be humble, and people are related , Each other needs, these concepts have been the premise of culture. For example, Schoenberg advocated that big data analysis is a weapon, but at the end of the book still can not help but caution that big data is not a "cold world filled with algorithms and machines." Human intuition, adventurism, accidents and The mistakes are still important. When using the tool of big data, "there should be a humble heart, bearing in mind the very essence of human nature."

In the age of social media, user experience is more important than ever. This experience is far from simple UI design. Every social media user is first and foremost. What are the special features of people? What are the special characteristics of people compared with the objects? At the same time, satisfying the needs of the users will not just inspire people The physical passions of the body will also include many invisible but existing needs such as respect, concern, sympathy and compassion.

This is a huge challenge for our country, which still treats people as production factors and resource consumers. For the hot and savage Chinese internet community, the idea of ​​"human nature," a seemingly non-commercial concept, should determine the fate of many companies.