Cargo cult data science
blog.richardweiss.org
Cargo cult data science
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: Cargo cult data science
#2Wow, this article is exactly what is happening in my project including the "data lake" part. The even more infuriating thing is when everything turns into a bizzaro world. Our boss made us spend an hour talking about the difference between "data lake" and "data ocean". The only thing one could do is facepalm
Re: Cargo cult data science
#3However, that assumes that someone presenting an analytical presentation will be viewed more favourably
Well, it certainly isn't helped by data scientists claiming to be better than ANY programmer and ANY statistician. Who could possibly live up to their own hype?
A DS and ML winter will follow just as it did for AI.
Re: Cargo cult data science
#4I’d say this piece applies outside of data science, too. It’s a nice reminder that technology can lead to culture change, but cannot drive it
Re: Cargo cult data science
#5Wow, this article is exactly what is happening in my project including the "data lake" part. The even more infuriating thing is when everything turns into a bizzaro world. Our boss made us spend an hour talking about the difference between "data lake" and "data ocean". The only thing one could do is facepalm
You read a well reasoned article and have first hand experience but frankly these are just two data points. You lack the data to justify the effort for a facepalm ;-)
Imho. a lot of these unbounded data projects are the result not just of cargo cult but satisfying a deeper need i.e. management avoiding decision making. It is much easier to go for broad data collection than making a directional decision, building a targeted model and making real world changes that lead to meaningful fact finding. Dreaming of data oceans is less risky than navigating a puddle but the latter moves you actually forward.
Re: Cargo cult data science
#6However, that assumes that someone presenting an analytical presentation will be viewed more favourably Well, it certainly isn't helped by data scientists claiming to be better than ANY programmer and ANY statistician. Who could possibly live up to their own hype? A DS and ML winter will follow just as it did for AI.
Yes. The blogpost is about the organizational difficulties in unlocking the value of technically sound "data science" projects, but these in turn are the tip of an iceberg of "omg watson" on the executive side and "machine learning does well on $archetypal_dataset, it can do anything!" on the techie side.
A while ago there was a Kaggle project to solve certain conjectures on prime number theory. Seriously?
Re: Cargo cult data science
#7"Experiements in data science"
Is the blog's title misspelled?
Re: Cargo cult data science
#8Wow, this article is exactly what is happening in my project including the "data lake" part. The even more infuriating thing is when everything turns into a bizzaro world. Our boss made us spend an hour talking about the difference between "data lake" and "data ocean". The only thing one could do is facepalm
You read a well reasoned article and have first hand experience but frankly these are just two data points. You lack the data to justify the effort for a facepalm ;-) Imho. a lot of these unbounded data projects are the result not just of cargo cult but satisfying a deeper need i.e. management avoiding decision making. It is much easier to go for broad data collection than making a directional decision, building a ta…
> management avoiding decision making
A solid point, but I'd also add justifying decision-making.
The stated reason for projects like this is usually to guide better decision making, which is only possible if the project succeeds. But as long as the project produces some kind of comprehensible output, it can be used as an excuse for making new decisions or changing old ones.
Dilbert used to have a lot of strips about managers using re-orgs to bury their bad decisions. From some of the horror stories I've heard lately, data science and analytics have taken over that role at many companies, helping to cover up power grabs and backtracking under the guise of "listening to the data".
Re: Cargo cult data science
#9"Experiements in data science" Is the blog's title misspelled?
no?
Re: Cargo cult data science
#10One key fact that I wish every product manager internalizes is that data science is a technology. And like all technologies, it may or may not be applicable to particular problem. And it may or may not be best use of an organization's time to invest in that technology v/s other options.
On the marketing side, just like a marketer will never market a database upgrade to users, she shouldn't consider marketing data science / ML directly to users. Users DO NOT care about using a data science enabled feature. They want value and progress in their lives and some times you may create more value by removing a form field than by investing in and delivering a data science project.
So use good business sense balance investment v/s reward for evaluating data science projects. I wrote about this here: https://growth.wingify.com/what-you-need-to-know-before-you-...