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The “data scientists” I’ve met are stupid.

One lady who I carpooled with was educated as a Bioethics PhD or equivalent and couldn’t get a job. Amazingly, she looked “incredible” to my employer, and she began her $150,000+ a year job as yet another data scientist.

They literally think they’ve done creditable work when they make the database servers grind away for over 24 hours using scripts they wrote that align random factors that have no plausible relation, against each other. They never have any business value, but they are novel, to be fair. For instance, she would map something like failed employee logins against customer receipts for one of our products. This will, of course, provide nothing of value, but it will show she did something for 24 hours across our server farm from a few minutes of work on her part, letting her claim she’s working overtime awaiting her results to enter another stupid association for another 24 hour run.

Why 24 hours? Because that triggers a routine that automatically terminates the call, and it makes a record that looks like another metric, proving her work and why nothing got spat out as output.

She loves Nate Silver. I told her Nate Silver is an absolute idiot, and I have his book. She was astonished at my position and I said I can prove five separate, successive times Nate Silver was completely wrong. She dared me, in front of the others. I immediately went to a collected video of his claims that the polls, and the country, were at “Peak Trump,” and it was technically impossible for Trump to ever win, because his analysis of the polls effectively guaranteed it.

The problem with that was Trump was now already the president, and she hated Trump, so to combine her biggest stat idol with having flat-out lied, looking completely stupid, sent her over the edge.

We didn’t talk again for a long, long while, in the car.