When the Best Insight is No Insight
Often, data science reminds us that it’s the journey that matters.
In Pixar's Madagascar, four zoo Penguins—Skipper, Kowalski, Rico, and Private—are captured in New York and put on a ship to take them to a wildlife preserve in Kenya. Determined to go to Antarctica instead, they overwhelm the captain, take control of the ship, and change course. They arrive at their promised land to find, well, nothing. No homecoming. No penguin paradise. Cold, barren, white. After a long silence, Private penguin calls it…
"Well, this sucks."
The irony was that their journey didn’t suck. It was hilarious, thrilling, and uncovered life lessons along the way.
Data science can be a Madagascar penguin journey. Days, weeks, months of work to find, so it seems, nothing. No aha moment. No needle in the haystack. And sometimes, a disappointing end reminds us of the most important lessons of all.
I'm a mentor for the Data Science For All program by Correlation One. It's a data analytics training and jobs program made available for free to qualifying students and professionals from underrepresented communities. Its goal is to provide pathways to economic opportunity in tech. Admission is as competitive as Stanford's; this year's program had over 1,000 students and 100 mentors.
My cohort chose an ambitious mission to discover and share predictive insights about the cryptocurrency market. They set out to even a playing field tipped toward Wall Street elites. A single bitcoin valued at $1 in 2011 is worth $50,000 today. Why shouldn't we have Crypto Returns for All?
Team 151 worked hard for months. They looked for statistical links between Twitter tweets and crypto price movement. They scoured massive amounts of historical price data. They explored every cryptocurrency from Bitcoin to Litecoin to Ethereum to Dogecoin to Ripple.
And they found... nothing. No stunning new insight… no way to predict where the price will go... They might be tempted, like Private penguin, to mutter, “Well, this sucks.”
But like the penguins, their journey was incredible. Team 151 found that data science is no panacea. They discovered that it’s the questions you uncover that matter, not only the answers. We learned about ourselves and each other. And as for cryptocurrency investing, we confirmed that it’s one big crapshoot.
Sometimes, oftentimes, data science reminds us that the best insight appears when there’s no insight at all.
