Summary Of What You Ll Do Next By David Brooks

David Brooks begins his paper, “What You’ll Do Next.” by introducing his reader to the latest phenomenon for predicting human behaviour, big data. Big data, as defined by Google are “extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions.” (Google search) Advocates for this new system, such as Viktor Mayer-Schönberg and Kenneth Cukier, authors of the book “Big Data”, say that it offers a clear idea of human behaviour, by making deductions based off of ‘correlations’ from databases of information, and rejecting human theories of causality. (Brooks) David Brooks admits that big data can yield impressive insights, such as locating flu using search trends on Google, but he criticizes the dismissal of human hypothesizing when making predictions, which Brooks believes limits big data. To support this claim, Brooks argues in his articles that big data is limited because ‘correlations’ are unclear, “people are discontinuous,” “the world is error-prone”, and some decisions need subjective input. (“What You’ll Do Next”) In this paper, we look at how Brooks constructs the arguments for each point
Brooks states in “What You’ll Do Next,” that many things can relate to each other , depending on how you look at them, and ultimately to get a meaningful connection, one must rely on ‘human theorizing.’ While I believe that Brooks makes a interesting point, I don’t believe he provides a clear illustration of his point. When he is talking about needing a ‘causal hypothesis’ in order to come up with ‘meaningful correlation,’ he does so without giving any specific examples of what these would be. This lack of a tangible idea, makes Brooks’s evidence ambiguous and unable to justify his point. Thus, even with an intriguing point, Brooks deprives it of weight by not giving an effective