Summary of the Talk
In a ted talk conducted by Jose Miguel Cansado, he talked about the applications of data science in basically every industry but when he started talking about the most important skills of a data scientist that’s what caught my eye. No, it’s not being able to code in R, being good at statistics, or even understanding how to collect, analyze, model, and apply data. While those things are definitely important it’s the human elements – according to Cansado – that really make data scientists who they are and it’s those human skills that make data science so successful. In the talk, Cansado states 6 traits of humans as the main important skills to be a data scientist: empathy, imagination, creativity, communication, leadership, and at the center of them all: curiosity. Before we get to why curiosity is at the center compared to any other one on the list let’s first start by defining what each of these things means in Cansado’s eyes.
Empathy: the key to connecting with others and understanding other people
Imagination: the key to visualizing what doesn’t exist yet
Creativity: the key to inventing and articulating solutions
Communication: the key to persuading, influencing, and spreading ideas that create change
Leadership: the key to stepping up and moving other people to action
Curiosity: this is what determines what you learn and search on google – what you are curious about
Cansado goes on to explain why he put curiosity as the intersection point between the other 5 traits. He does it through examples. He says “It is curiosity for emotions that drives empathy. It is curiosity for ideas that drives imagination. It is curiosity for solutions that drives creativity. It is curiosity for influencing that drives communications. It is curiosity for results that drives leadership.” When it’s put like that it starts to make a lot more sense right? Curiosity for something drives all the other characteristics. Therefore, to have any one of the other characteristics you need curiosity cementing itself in the middle of the web.
My Take
This whole talk really changed my opinion about data science. My opinion went from you need to be good at coding and math to be a good data scientist to you need to be a good person. This got my mind thinking, If the most important thing that you need to be good at data science is to be a good person and to have internal qualities, then it will be really hard, if not impossible, to automate this job. This is good because then the job market for a data scientist has a bright and fruitful future. That thought was reassuring to me with all of the news that this job is going to be automated, and then this one, and this one. This one talk gave me some reassurance about the future of human data scientists. Cansado even says “big data needs the curious brain of an artist to make a difference. “this no program could do because it conflicts with the very definition of curiosity: when you aren’t told what to do, what do you do? What thing keeps you up at night, what thing if you aren’t occupied does your brain go to? For me that’s data but for a robot, it’s nothing because a robot has to be programmed, otherwise, it can’t do anything, it has to be told what to do, making it incapable to be curious.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it’s not the coding skills, the analyzing skills, or any technical skill that makes a data scientist great, it’s the human side of them. It’s the person they are, what they think about, what drives them, their interpersonal skills, how able they are to step up, and most importantly: how curious they are. These skills conflict with the very definition of what robots are so they couldn’t do our job well if they tried. All in all, it was a great talk that really kept me fruitful and excited, I hope it resonates with you in this way too!