Data Science, Senior Managers, and the Ever Interesting Notion of Truth
August 3, 2015
I read “Data Scientists to CEOs: You Can’t Handle the Truth.” I enjoy write ups about data science which start off with the notion of truth. I know that the “truth” referenced is the outputs of analytics systems.
Call me skeptical. If the underlying data are not normalized, validated, and timely, the likelihood of truth becomes even murkier than it was in my college philosophy class. Roger Ailes allegedly said:
Truth is whatever people will believe.
Toss in the criticism of a senior manager who in the US is probably a lawyer or an accountant, and you have a foul brew. Why would a manager charged with hitting quarterly targets or generating enough money to meet payroll quiver with excitement when a data scientist presents “truth.”
There is that pesky perception thing. There are frames of reference. There are subjective factors in play. Think of the dentist who killed Cecil. I am not sure data science will solve his business and personal challenges. Do you?
The write up is a silly fan rant for the fuzzy discipline of data science. Data science does not pivot on good old statisticians with their love of SAS and SPSS, fancy math, and 17th century notions of what constitutes a valid data set. Nope.
The data scientist has to communicate the known unknowns to his or her CEO. Shades of Rumsfeld. Does today’s CEO want to know more about the uncertainty in the business? The answer is, “Maybe.” But senior managers often get information that is filtered, shaped, and presented to create an illusion. Shattering those illusions can have some negative career consequences even for data scientists, assuming there is such a discipline as data science.
Evoking the truth from statistical processes which are output from system configured by others can be interesting. Those threshold settings are not theoretical. Those settings determine what the outputs are and what they are “about.”
Connecting an automated output to something that the data scientist asserts should be changed strikes me as somewhat parental. How does that work on a manager like Dick Cheney? How does that work on the manager of a volunteer committee working on a parent teacher luncheon?
I thought the Jack Benny program from the 1930s to 1960s was amusing. Some of the output about data science suggests that comedy may be a more welcoming profession than management based on truth from data science. Truth and statistics. Amazing comedy.
Stephen E Arnold, August 3, 2015
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