Fifteen years ago, Science published predictions from each of 60 scientists about the future of their fields. The physical and natural scientists wrote about a succession of breathtaking discoveries to be made, inventions to be constructed, problems to be solved, and policies and engineering changes that might become possible. In sharp contrast, the (smaller number of ) social scientists did not mention a single problem they thought might be addressed, much less solved, or any inventions or discoveries on the horizon. Instead, they wrote about social science scholarship—how we once studied this, and in the future we’re going to be studying that.
That is Harvard’s Gary King. The rest of the article suggests that the mountain of data and analysis tools we have might change matters, but a few safeguards and systems and supports have yet to appear. Worth reading.
And he is on Twitter.
One Response
Dear Chris,
Thanks for posting this! It looks like we had the same bedtime reading recently.
Gary King has been an early visionary in understanding the promise of new data and new analytical tools for researchers, and in laying out their technological, analytical and legal implications. Other early adopters in academia and the civil society are already working on these problems, as you know (not to mention the billions of dollars that private corporations are investing in data analytics). But for the most part social scientists and development practitioners have not yet fully realized that this is a train they cannot afford to miss, and have not even begun to work out what the “firehose” of new types of digital data means for their work. We’re working on some of this at the UN Global Pulse, to learn how we can leverage these new resources to better understand human behavior in real time, especially how vulnerable populations are affected by global shocks, and ‘mainstream’ this approach in the UN system. We think the potential is tremendous.
We hope you will keep reporting on progress and initiatives in this area and that it will trigger some discussions and interest among your readers.
Thanks,
Eva Kaplan and Emmanuel Letouzé,
UN Global Pulse
Executive-Office of the Secretary-General