@davidgerard it's worth reading this paragraph from someone at #RenaissanceTechnologies, the most successful hedge fund to ever walk the earth, about what exactly it is all those PhDs do all day, because I suspect (or rather I know) that there's a lot of truth to it.

most "data science" is people people running these crazy models with patchy data, the results of which they feed to decision makers with so many millions of caveats that it's functionally useless.

BUT the flip side of that is that the basic, unsexy part of "data work" is incredibly powerful if you get it right. Which is why the true masters at Renaissance use their PhDs to sit around and clean data all day every day - to make sure the small things are right. they never use the complicated models, only the simplest, most basic model of all: single variable regression.
https://twitter.com/Cryptadamist/status/1603119342798786560