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Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

>"you too can become a data scientist with 3 weeks of Python + scikit-learn"...

I don't think any serious practitioners were out there thinking in this manner. But there is a gold rush right now, and any gold rush will attract its share of charlatans.

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I see it all the time in my domain (search). Novice data scientists getting into a new field quickly get frustrated with existing practitioners. Existing practitioners want to use tried and true methods; data scientists want to reinvent the field with ML. The existing practitioners don’t know how to manage the usually black-box ML solution. Data scientists don't know the domain enough to be effective. So it doesn’t go far.

It’s a dynamic that sadly burns out overly optimistic, but smart data scientists and sadly leaves a negative impression on existing practitioners on the promise of ML. Those practitioners stick their head back in a hole instead of innovating.

All to say with more explainable ML (and more humility on everyone’s part) more progress would be made.

In fact, many quantatitive researchers in their domain are already data scientists without using modern tools like machine learning. Being able to use these tools is only the beginning of a new practicing and advancing.

I consider it the responsibility of computer scientists and engineers to make the tools better and easier. But unfortunately, it's that one has to become a good computer scientist first then a domain expert.

We are not doing enough on innovations of tooling.

Computing people in general seem to have forgotten the whole reason our field exists is to build tools for other people, the ones who do the "real work". With the possible exception of video games nothing we do with computers is useful or interesting on its own, its only point is to assist other fields. So we can have all the advances in the world but if we cant make them into useful tools, what was the point.

> I don't think any serious practitioners were out there thinking in this manner.

But a lot of thought pieces / YouTubers are pushing it, which is a problem.

There are a whole ton of students coming out of one year masters DS programs, who don’t know that much more.

Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/1831/

well, as long as your serious practitioners aren't trying to get hired they should be just fine

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