I've been reflecting from time to time on the mystery of Hadley
Wickham's "Readings in Applied Data Science" at Stanford:
https://github.com/hadley/stats337
The mystery is the only not-optional reading for the first week on "What
the *&!% is data science?". It's a very short blog post with title
"Data scientists mostly do arithmetic and that's a good thing": https://m.signalvnoise.com/data-scientists-mostly-just-do-arithmetic-and-that-s-a-good-thing-c6371885f7f6
. Why this short throwaway thing as the main reading, rather than, say,
one of the optional readings like Donoho's big and thoughtful "50 Years
of Data Analysis" (https://courses.csail.mit.edu/18.337/2015/docs/50YearsDataScience.pdf).
I think I understand it now. The question that the blog post raises is a
deep one. If many data scientists are doing arithmetic, what the
*&!% are courses on data science going to teach?
At the same time, I finally read "Data scientist: the sexist job of the
21st century" (https://hbr.org/2012/10/data-scientist-the-sexiest-job-of-the-21st-century).
The impression that I came away with, is that data scientists, in
industry, are "data hackers", the data equivalent of the hacker movement
in computing. They improvise, they invent, they build, they share.
Why did that happen now? Back to Hadley Wickham. It is because we have
the tools now - particularly R and Python. It was technically possible
to do this before, but it was too difficult and consuming of time and
technical effort. The analyst was buried in technical problems, making
to harder for them to think, and taking away mind space for working on
new problems. These languagues have developed to the stage where they
have made these problems vastly easier to solve and to explain. The
result is an explosive growth in the range of tasks that data analysts
can work on. Data scientists are the people who found these tools, and
saw how they could apply them. Now let's work out what we should
teach.
The Google+ URL for this post was
https://plus.google.com/+MatthewBrett/posts/gZAtY9bMAUR