I’ve been studying data science lately. It’s funny because you see, data science basically tries to make computers behave like humans, at least a major chunk of it works toward that goal. Yet, the more I study it, the more I have started understanding how humans work.
I guess it’s difficult to judge the human experience from our bird’s eye view of it – it feels complex and annoying and just chaotic – but if you start seeing things as individual problems, it gets simpler. For example, when you make choices, you’re just doing a decision tree. When you’re making decisions based on experience, you’re just solving a classification problem. When you’re trying to figure out who is important and who isn’t, you’re clustering.
Jargons, I know. Sorry for the math overwhelm. Still, I want to get this thought out there. Data science tries to emulate human behaviour. Yet, I’ve felt it has brought me better clarity somewhat on how a human sees things.
The way I see it, all we’re really trying to do at the end of the day is figure out the answer to this one question for countless problems – which side of the line do I lie on? That’s data science.