The Brutal Truth about Data Science and Data Scientists

Most data scientists and the organizations that employ them don't seem to understand how data science is actually done, nor what it is exactly. They sort of jumped on the bandwagon -- without really understanding it, nor why it was important to them in a very visceral way. Science is not merely predictive -- at its heart, it is explanatory as well as diagnostic. Science leads to engineering -- a systematic mathematical approach to creating technology solutions based on the exploitation of some natural phenomenon. Winning Kaggle competitions is not data science; though, it is a reasonable start, I suppose – even though the best models in Kaggle are actually built by machines running genetic algorithms, where natural selection drives the outcome.