Are you a data analyst? Then you probably work too hard and need a break, otherwise you wouldn’t be one 😼…
OK, are you a data analyst and not convinced you need a break? Well, what if I made that break data-related? Now we’re talking, I bet.
If you have a spare hour check out The Joy of Stats documentary, available in a less-than-stellar resolution on YouTube (for now):
Have you seen this documentary before? Did you just do it now? Let me know what you thought in the comments. Some takeaways from me:
The joy of data science stats
This documentary was released in 2010, the beginning of the Big Data craze. In a lot of ways, this is a buzzword that has subsided, but you’ll still hear from data people who seem to think data science killed the statistician star: just amass enough data and enough compute power, and who cares about all these fusty old theorems?
While it’s true that cheap computing and huge datasets have changed how we work with stats (the documentary does explore this to some extent), what statistics can do for us has not changed.
“Statistics tells us whether the things we think and believe are actually true,” as stated in the documentary. It’s a tool for making sense of the world and engaging with it, rather than a way to check out and let the computer handle things.
This medium of engagement, however, can be a double-edged sword.
“Statistics” is from the state
I love etymology because it often provides such useful context about a word’s meaning. For example, statistics gets its name because it came from the state. Governments used statistics to gather intelligence on their economy, their population and more.
So while we see “open data portals” and other government tactics to collect and share data as a shot at transparency, it’s worth remembering that statistics was initially a method of control and can still be used as such (think about the Chinese social credit system, for example).
The joy of storytelling (with data)
If you’ve spent any time in analytics, you’ve heard the phrase “storytelling with data.” What does that even mean?
Like many topics, you understand it best by seeing it for yourself. And there may be no better vision of storytelling with data than this short clip from The Joy of Stats. The late Hans Rosling still commands respect from the entire analytics community and beyond.
If you haven’t seen the documentary at all, consider checking out this part as an appetizer for more to come:
Data is more than rows and columns
Later parts of the documentary branch from the history of statistics and current, conventional approaches into its future.
For example, how can we apply statistical learning to natural language? How can we engage with not just this world, but the entire cosmos? If you’ve wondered about the conceptual foundations of what’s going on at NASA, or Silicon Valley, or any other geek bastion, you should check out this documentary.
Worth the watch
I know as analysts we can be pretty critical about using our time. But the benefit far exceeds the cost of the one-hour Joy of Stats runtime. Take a look and let me know what strikes out to you in the comments.
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