Documenting my path from "SQL Data Analyst pursuing an Engineering Master's Degree" to "Data Scientist"
Data Scientist, Author, and manager of data science teams Enda Ridge talks to us about data governance, data provenance, reproducible analysis, work pipelines and products, and people, among other topics covered in his book “Guerrilla Analytics – A practical Approach to Working with Data: The Savvy Manager’s Guide”.
Podcast Audio Links:
Link to podcast Episode 7 audio
As data scientists, we are aware that bias exists in the world. We read up on stories about how cognitive biases can affect decision-making. We know that, for instance, a resume with a white-sounding name will receive a different response than the same resume with a black-sounding name, and that writers of performance reviews use different language to describe contributions by women and men in the workplace. We read stories in the news about ageism in healthcare and racism in mortgage lending.
Data scientists are problem solvers at heart, and we love our data and our algorithms that sometimes seem to work like magic, so we may be inclined to try to solve these problems stemming from human bias by turning the decisions over to machines. Most people seem to believe that machines are less biased and more pure in their decision-making – that the data tells the truth, that the machines won’t discriminate.
