Re:A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn
by dasil003 on Friday January 09, 2015 @11:29PM
(#8865917)
This is like saying that all the programming jobs are going to go away because of some visual programming language just over the horizon. The fact is we are generating more and more data every day, and there are infinite ways to formulate and look at it. The tools that C-suite can use will never be powerful enough to do what a data scientist does because of the variety of data that exists. You can only dumb it down to the lowest common denominator, and the LCD will not be very useful unless the scope is extremely narrow.
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Re:A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn
by eli_gottlieb on Saturday January 10, 2015 @03:39AM
(#8866321)
>and there are infinite ways to formulate and look at it.
Of course there aren't. The best way is to know exactly the causal process generating the data, thus enabling you to predict your variable-of-interest perfectly from the limited data.
This isn't currently possible, of course, but there's one best way to interpret data, not an infinity.
Re:A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn
by dasil003 on Saturday January 10, 2015 @10:37AM
(#8866958)
Of course there are, because there are infinite forms of data. And to say that there is always one best way to interpret data, well, I don't even know where to begin with such a naive declaration.
Re:A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn
by infinite8s on Saturday January 10, 2015 @12:39PM
(#8867288)
Philosophically, there is only one best way to interpret data - if you know the underlying causes then that provides the only explanatory power you need. A similar argument could be made to our understanding of multiple physical phenoma prior to Newton deriving His equations - your statement is equivalent to saying that there are multiple valid interpretations of how the planets revolve around the sun and apples fall from trees.
Re:A Career in Science Will Cost You Your Firstborn
by dasil003 on Saturday January 10, 2015 @04:20PM
(#8867967)
The data we care about are not the direct result of physical laws, they are the result of chaotic systems both natural (eg. weather) and human (eg. stock markets).
For your tortured analogy to bear any fruit you have to assume that we're just waiting to find a dead simple set of equations that explains all human endeavor, and after that finite memory and computation power won't be an issue because, hey, cause and effect.