A sense of wonder through data science

The problem is choice

Everyday when I drive to work in Amsterdam, I do myself the pleasure of listening to an interesting podcast. My choice of podcasts in the morning differs from learning Mandarin Chinese to new sales strategies. I started with listening to the radio but after many, many, many commutes all the commercial breaks in between radio shows got me too annoyed and a friend of mine tipped me off about podcasts.

This morning I listened to a Dutch podcast from “De Correspondent” where Lex Bohlmeijer conducts interviews with seemingly random people. I can’t really find a common thread in why people are invited besides their personal topics always being highly interesting. This time I listened to a two-piece interview with Erik de Jong, a Dutch musician better known as Spinvis.

Driving through beautiful, flat, grassland views and getting to work like cows in a parade, I challenged myself to connect the topic at hand with my work at Quantillion.

How does a conversation between interviewer and journalist Lex Bohlmeijer and interviewee and musician Spinvis, ring my Data Science bells?

The only constant…

Happily, this cheesy line about change is avoided and the conversation is moreso about maintaining grip and how to keep a hold on in these changing times. Although not disturbing, due to the philosophical nature of the songs Spinvis writes, the interview is also somewhat woolly. Actually it got me rather excited. In light of connecting the philosophical dots to data science, it got the creative part of my brain working in overdrive.

A little further in the podcasts they talk about memories in life. And a person being simply a collection of scars and memories, where somewhere in between is the self. Lex Bohlmeijer then states that also 2016 has left its’ marks. Spinvis reacts by saying when looking back only a year or sometimes even as short as ten minutes, he already feels naive. “What did I know back then?”. Let alone looking back five, ten or twenty years!

Now Spinvis’ philosphical wind blew hard against the wings of my creative brain-mill and got my motor running. He took a small example about a Dutch app called “Buienradar”. This app precisely shows you when it’s going to rain. And if it indeed starts to rain at a given moment in time he remembers his earlier state, thinking: “How naive was I? What did I know back then?”. In turn, Lex Bohlmeijer remarked: “What does this knowledge do with things like the element of surprise?”. Spinvis answered that we start to lose the sense of wonder with all this knowledge by our weird craving of having the need to control everything. Because in turn we start to expect things and thereby derive a certain entitlement from it.

When the app predicts sunny weather but you get rain instead, somehow you felt entitled to getting sunny weather.

Finally he goes on worrying about it seemingly being the end of the truth-era - “Science is now just another opinion”. Facts seem to be irrelevant and rather believing something simple instead of something complex, seems to be underlying.

Connecting the dots

On a daily basis I talk to people working at companies who come to understand that there is a whole lot of value in their own data. As they now grasp that idea it slowly becomes a more urgent matter. “We need to do ‘something’ with our data”. This I find awesome, because (hopefully) it originated from a craving of wanting to do better by understanding their own business or to better advicing ones clients. There are a lot of companies nowadays that can help you with doing ‘something’ with data. I believe it to be valuable to keep in mind when receiving the first predictive analyses, algorithms or results; try not to feel too entitled to that which was predicted. Because if the values derived from a data science project were different from the actual results, it means we still don't fully understand the challenge your client, you and your supplier are facing. It means the complexity is even greater then previously thought.

So...

Enjoy the wonder of predicting sunny weather and in fact needing to cycle through the rain and into the wind. Enjoy the wonder of not yet understanding or maybe not yet even believing the insights. Enjoy the wonder of your creative brain being required to work overtime in order to make sense of it all. Enjoy the wonder of the awesome opportunity at hand. But more so...

Enjoy the wonder of sometimes being totally out of control.

Joran Wamelink - Business Developer @ Quantillion