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🧵 1/9 A future of data science | @allendowney

How did I get here?

How did we get here?

Where do we go from here?

🧵 2/9

When his partner was pregnant, he tried to learn whether babies are more likely to be early or late.

Lots of anecdotes, but top hits weren't science.

So he found the real data and wrote about it, and now he's the "expert" in search.

He moved a question from unanswered to answered.

🧵 3/9

Data science is tools and processes for answering questions resolving disagreements and making better decisions.

"Data Science exists because Statistics missed the boat on computers."

He's going to talk to us about data science on the "plateau of productivity".

🧵 5/9

Peak: 2010 to 2012. Netflix prize, kaggle turned data science into spectator sport, Moneyball turned spectator sports into data science

Trough: 2016 to nowish. Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil, lots of data science failures (or perceived failures)

🧵 6/9

Data journalism is improving data literacy.
WaPo has better stats on gun violence than the fbi
NY times has better traffic data than (the ntsb? Missed which agency he said, this is a fast/dense talk!)

🧵 7/9

People born in 1990s and 2000s are sadder than in the past. Young people are more unhappy now than any previous generation at any age.

Read "Factfulness" (2018) by Hans Rosling for some antedotes to the perception of everything getting worse. Adding it to my personal reading list right now!

🧵 8/9

"On long term trends, almost everything is getting better"
"And we still have challenging problems"
"And history suggests we can address them"

For climate change case, read "Not the End of the World" by Hannah Ritchie

🧵 9/9

I didn't expect this to be a talk about where to find hope. I appreciate the surprise therapy session! Thanks, @allendowney!

Slides with lots of useful links and book recommendations: tinyurl.com/dow24pos

@allendowney offers advice to new data scientists: "learn python" (laughs). But I thought you were arguing that we should be MORE hopeful, Allen! 🙃

@jonthegeek @allendowney thanks for sharing the slides. Train wifi sucks and I’m going to miss this mornings’ talks. I’ll live vicariously through your toots.

@jonthegeek One thing I've always wondered about is cultural pressure around happiness.

I think there were time periods where people felt they were "supposed" to be happy and may have felt a need to self-report that.

I also think current young people have a great culture of awareness of social problems... but that means they may view self-reported happiness as naivety and/or problematic privilege.

@jonthegeek hard to find happiness when the world is on fire and so much more

@unicornCoder please see the rest of the toots. It feels so much constantly worse but it really is constantly better! I have a lot of trouble seeing that sometimes myself.

@jonthegeek Thank you very much for your great coverage!

@jonthegeek historically in 1930s-1960s, the compute machine was multivariate calculus, that's how people derived the sampling distributions. That's how we got stuck with the notion that statistics is about mathematical derivations... missing the boat, etc.

@jonthegeek I have known this blog post for a long time. It's one of my favorites of all time! :)