Good post. I found the article insightful. The power of data is certainly made clear in the article and I have to agree. Google and Facebook have built huge business all based on massive amounts of data. The degrees of tomorrow are statistics and computer science: being able to draw implications from data, and being able to collect, organize and use massive amount of data. I found the paragraph on "computational politics" particularly interesting. The idea that the tools we use in quantitative finance could be applied to other "qualitative" disciplines to yield positive results.
The only issue I see with a continued expansion of math and science into the world of finance is the continued move away from common sense and financial intuition to data, graphs, and formulas. Data based models can be scary because they foster the causation vs. correlation argument. Should a stock really rally when it crosses its X-day MA or does it rally because everyone else has that built into their model? To me there is an implicit error in that. We need models with fundamental economic or business motivation, fueled by data. It's flawed to find data that has a nice correlation and then think of reasons why that might be causation.
Sort of got off topic, anyway.. long article, but worth reading.
