I’ve been finding it fascinating to watch on as data scientists discuss the death of data science. It all started with a rather sensationalized post over at Slashdot: “Data Science is Dead” by Miko Matsumura, Vice President at Hazelcast. It wasn’t even a question for discussion, but rather a declaration of a foregone conclusion. The subtitle for the piece was “Not only is Data Science not a science, it’s not even a good job prospect.” Well, those are fightin’ words to a data scientist like me!
The discussion that ensued over on the forum of the LinkedIn group Advanced Business Analytics, Data Mining and Predictive Modeling is becoming quite heated (and at times nasty) with “my data is bigger than your data” talk. I love when geeks battle it out. It’s better than a bum fight.
But before I get to the LinkedIn flame war going on, let’s take a look at the article that started it all. Below is the picture that accompanied the post. I’ve seen this image before in several places on the web and it disturbs me at a fundamental level. It is as-if some marketing type was asked to create a blackboard full of mathematics but he/she didn’t know any mathematics and this is what they came up with. Silly. Repugnant. But the author of the article somehow tries to give the impression that data science is just a bunch of hooey and here’s the proof on the blackboard. Very weak argument.
