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Data Pseudo-Science: Selling Garbage to Data Illiterates
The dark side of data science no one talks about.
Gregory had been working as a bank consultant for two years. He was good with numbers, and he had people skills, making it easy for him so sell finance products to his clients. When COVID hit the world economy, Gregory lost his job and looked for an alternative which allowed working from home. Luckily, he had some savings, so he was not in a big hurry to find a new job, but he would need an income stream eventually. Screening the job market, Gregory noticed the large demand for data scientists across different industries.
He already had a little bit of coding experience and decided to build upon this knowledge and his number talent. Gregory took a few data science online courses, read articles about the subject on Medium, and watched some YouTube videos on coding with Python. He signed up on a freelance platform, which he figured was the easiest way to get started with his new career path.
His first data science gig literally earned him only a handful of dollars. But he learned something interesting: That many companies outsource relatively simple tasks. He continued along this path. After a couple of months, Gregory had harvested quite a few of these low-hanging fruits. He was still scratching the surface of data science, and he wasn’t making a…
