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"You Too Can Become a Data Scientist

So the bottomline is that there is big money looming. Fortunes will be made and lost. Which means you too should attempt to become a data scientist.

The skills have become increasingly easy to acquire, and are getting easier by the week. But at the same time, cultural barriers to people self-classifying into the data scene are being erected.

Redefine yourself while you can. Let me know if you need any pickaxes."

data-science data-curation description metaphor business economics

"Adam Smith and the ‘invisible hand’ are nearly synonymous in modern economic thinking. Adam Smith is strongly associated with the invisible hand, understood as a general rule that people in realising their self-interests unintentionally benefit the public good. The attribution to Smith is challengeable. Adam Smith’s use of the metaphor was much more modest; it was re-invented in the 1930s and 1940s onwards to bolster mathematical treatments of capitalism (Samuelson, Friedman) and to support innovative analysis by associating the metaphor with ‘spontaneous order’ (Hayek). The effect has been to ignore insightful explanations about how markets function as a process in favour of semi-mystical beliefs in imagined outcomes, wrapped in an isolated 18th-century literary metaphor, which does not explain anything."

people(AdamSmith) history economics ideology invisible metaphor ideas

people(AdamSmith) history economics ideology invisible metaphor ideas

"And yet: human beings (not just economists), when called upon to explain how society works, have a strange tendency to reach first for efficient market hypotheses, and to hold on like grim death. Natural or even cosmic orders of orderly payback. That’s the ticket. We are ‘in debt’ to the gods, or our parents, or society. Graeber is quick to point out the inadequacies of these metaphors."

book review debt metaphor philosophy ethics anthropology ancient principles sociology society

media criticism 20c global-village metaphor trickster religion media-studies

computing computer-science technology metaphor interface stream lifestream

"The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis in quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions; I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies."

network-analysis networks performativity metaphor research draft

"The metaphor of “occupation” strikes me as a provocative one not only for what the activists in Manhattan and elsewhere are doing, but for what they are struggling against."

occupations wall-street protest activism metaphor capitalism anarchism intellectual

"What does it mean that people are inclined to think of the federal budget in the subjunctive, as if it were like the budget of a typical household? What “work” does it do for the people who espouse it?"

economics metaphor politics state family nation anthropology culture common-sense

Lakoff, Foucoult, Calme-Griaule

categories quotes psychology cognition metaphor taxonomy

"But let me propose instead a metaphor that I find more congenial for understanding the architecture of the political moment.

Let’s say you’re a player for a perpetually losing sports team in a league where there’s two or three teams that always dominate the competition year after year. Everyone but the die-hard fans have deserted you. Some of your former fans have just given up watching the sport altogether, some watch the winning teams diffidently from afar.

It’s a familiar scenario from a zillion sports films and even occasionally resembles the real-life narratives that emerge out of sports and games.

As a member of the always-losing team, you have a few explanatory options, which then suggest a few possible ways to act:"

politics metaphor explanation leftism liberal

story-telling parables form genre knowledge-management utility metaphor anecdote observation typology

"A little excess social capital couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. Playing Indian is a dynamic practice, changing with time as American anxieties change from one generation to the next. Giving Bin Laden the code name “Geronimo” rises out of the need to address the ambivalence Americans have over the value of the current war. By imbuing it with Indians the war is legitimated but it is also made comprehensible. The current war is made legible in terms of previous wars. In fact, the ideology of American/ Indian martial conflict and the contradictory imagery of Indians as Us and Not-Us plays itself out, over and over again, in every American military conflict. This is part of American culture and shows how we make war make sense."

war terrorism metaphor identity native-american sensemaking

"This is what Haiti is both victim and symbol of—this new, rapacious stage of capitalism. A cannibal stage where, in order to power the explosion of the super-rich and the ultra-rich, middle classes are being forced to fail, working classes are being re-proletarianized, and the poorest are being pushed beyond the grim limits of subsistence, into a kind of sepulchral half-life, perfect targets for any “natural disaster” that just happens to wander by. It is, I suspect, not simply an accident of history that the island that gave us the plantation big bang that put our world on the road to this moment in the capitalist project would also be the first to warn us of this zombie stage of capitalism, where entire nations are being rendered through economic alchemy into not-quite alive. In the old days, a zombie was a figure whose life and work had been captured by magical means. Old zombies were expected to work around the clock with no relief. The new zombie cannot expect work of any kind—the new zombie just waits around to die. "

apocalypse earthquake disaster metaphor meaning interpretation country(Haiti) neoliberalism

"OK, this is admittedly very, very loose — but here are some different characterizations of markets, sort of a rough and naive meta-taxonomy of markets:"

markets metaphor list ideas

"A new study of word frequencies in political blogs finds that equations describing earthquake evolution fit the eruption of topics onto political blogs.

News tends to move quickly through the public consciousness, noted physicist Peter Klimek of the Medical University of Vienna and colleagues in a paper posted on arXiv.org. Readers usually absorb a story, discuss it with their friends, and then forget it. But some events send lasting reverberations through society, changing opinions and even governments."

public-opinion words language weblog-analysis weblog-research weblog statistics earthquake metaphor

bureaucracy computer-science metaphor humor

Here, then, is my question: Are you and I machines? Are we analyzable without remainder into a collection of mechanisms whose operation can be fully explained by the causal operation of physical and chemical laws, starting from the parts and proceeding to the whole? It might seem so, judging from the insistent testimony of those whose work is to understand life.

biology explanation metaphor machine science philosophy

"Writing a dissertation is like playing center field with one difference:

No satisfying recoil. "

academic baseball sports metaphor writing dissertation

"Who, then, does it serve to imagine that we are wolves and sheep, fools and savages? Lee Clarke, a disaster sociologist and professor at Rutgers, wrote after Hurricane Katrina, “Disaster myths are not politically neutral, but rather work systematically to the advantage of elites. Elites cling to the panic myth because to acknowledge the truth of the situation would lead to very different policy prescriptions than the ones currently in vogue.” That is to say, if we are wolves and sheep, and so not to be trusted, then they are the shepherds and the wolf-killers."

disaster media metaphor propaganda militarism government framing crisis earthquake country(Japan)