You're everything that everyone hates in academia. Congratulations as I hear that self importance is one of the key ingredients to solving the biggest problems facing the world today.
Well, I would posit that the majority of data science positions are in advertising and marketing optimization. I would believe that 'global food security' may be more important than social media analysis, as the original posted speculated.
Not to belittle the meaningful point, but becoming a "data scientist" at a startup or large corporation that makes their money by advertising is analogous to becoming a 'quant' on wall-street in the 80's. You have to be in it to make money, rather than caring about the types of data the developed algorithms are applied on.
I mean, developing a new algorithm for data analysis could be just as important to the OP as analyzing bio data to forecast some sort of disease is to someone else.
Actually advertising and marketing optimization is a very critical problem that hasn't been completely solved yet, especially when privacy concerns are taken into consideration. It is critical towards keeping the Web free and create a more inter-connected economy. While this will obviously have the side-effects of "frivolous" analytics, there is indeed a dearth of enough hybrid practitioners-researchers in data science today. It will probably saturate in 5-10 years but I'm no analyst to predict that.
I doubt that. Firstly because most people don't hate anything in academia, and secondly because you know very little about me.
Perhaps my short comment sounded more arrogant than I am... I'm motivated by wanting to help people. If given the choice between trying to help alleviate starvation for little money and trying to optimise advertising on some website for a shitload of money, I'll take the former.
Interesting that you think moral judgements are an indicator of self importance.
But couldn't optimizing advertising on some website for a shitload of money lead one to develop a novel algorithm or modeling framework that had applicability to diverse fields including alleviating starvation?
Is culture important? Is The Big Lebowski frivolous? Is Old Navy Performance Fleece is a waste of time? Should the cast of SNL all quit and start learning R? Do those folks not pay taxes and thus support most academic research?
I just have to challenge the assumption that it is obvious which things are important, moral, and noble and which things are frivolous. Perhaps in hindsight those things are clear. History will be the judge, as a wise man once said. Or maybe he wasn't wise. Or maybe he made some unwise decisions and learned from them. Or maybe it doesn't matter, and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt because the secret to happiness is thinking happy thoughts.
