mathbabe

You note that there’s very little theoretical literature on data science in practice. But doesn’t that siloing of practice from theory occur in all applicable disciplines? While having little time for theory may be part of the problem, I suspect not being at liberty to say may be a bigger part. Perhaps working in theory is “publish or perish” and working in practice is “publish and perish” (variant on “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you.”

I think the only performant accountability mechanism for data science is a competing data science community that is outside the for-profit sector. (public option?) This could combine participants from all the sectors other than that one; academics, civil servants; even hobbyists. Whatever is to data science as open source software is to software. I think you’ll get farther letting researchers do applied work than getting applied workers to publish research.

The call for professional ethics among data scientists is cute. Before you can have professional ethics, you have to have a profession. Michael O. Church provides some insight as to how a profession gets to be a profession:

Clerking evolved from an apprenticeship to a tournament at which most would fail, and the post-1870-ish specialization of the clerkship phase meant like must compete against like, as is true even today, for the limited supply of positions in The Business proper. Accountants competed with other accountants for the limited leadership positions, and marketing analysts went against other marketing analysts, and so on for each field. There was one group that realized, very quickly, that they were getting screwed by this: lawyers. Law is, of all the specialties that a business requires, perhaps the most cognitively demanding one that existed, at least with substantial numbers, in the late 19th century. It tended (like computer programming, today) to draw in the hyper-cerebral types insistent on tackling the big intellectual challenges. Or, to put it more bluntly, they were a very smart pool and it was tough for a lawyer to distinguish himself with a level of intelligence that would be dominant had time and opportunity brought him into a different pool, but might only be average among attorneys.
Lawyers realized that they were getting burned by “like competes against like” in the tournament for the opportunity to become actual partners in the business (i.e. executives and owners). The good news, for them as a tribe, was that they knew how to control and work the law, that being their job. They professionalized. They formed the American Bar Association (in the U.S.) and made it standard that, in corporate bureaucracies, lawyers report only into other attorneys. In-house corporate attorneys report to other attorneys, up to the General Counsel, who reports to the board (not the CEO). Law firms cannot be owned by non-lawyers. Accreditation also ensures (at least, in theory) a basic credibility for all members of the profession: one who loses a client is still a lawyer. The core concept here is that, while an attorney is a provider of services, attorneys are not supposed to be business subordinates (clerks). They have the right and obligation to follow ethical mandates that supersede managerial authority. This requires that the profession back them if they lose their jobs; the value of a limited-supply accreditation is that a person who is fired for exercising that (mandatory) ethical independence remains marketable and (in theory, at least) can resume his or her career, more or less, uninterrupted. Without that type of assurance, that level of ethical and professional independence is quite obviously impossible.

That, or gotta wobble that job…

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