Cargo Cult Data Science by Jim Harris.
From the post:
Last week, Phil Simon blogged about being wary of snake oil salesman who claim to be data scientists. In this post, I want to explore a related concept, namely being wary of thinking that you are performing data science by mimicking what data scientists do.
The American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman coined the term cargo cult science to refer to practices that have the semblance of being scientific, but do not in fact follow the scientific method.
As Feynman described his analogy, “in the South Seas there is a cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.”
Feynman’s description of the runway and controller reminds me of attempts to create systems with semantic “understanding.”
We load them up with word lists, thesauri, networks of terms, the equivalent of runways.
We give them headphones (ontologies) with bars of bamboo (syntax) sticking out of them.
And after all that, semantic understanding continues to elude us.
Maybe those efforts are missing something essential? (Like us?)