Some, such as Wired editor Chris Anderson, turn this opacity into a positive. Anderson argued controversially in 2008 that Big Data (the principle that says N must be all) undercuts the basic idea that historically underlay statistics as a science: that of formulating and carefully testing hypotheses to establish precisely stated correlations and, where possible, causal relations between variables. … Out with every theory of human behaviour, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology and psychology. The point is that they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 394