Is “data science” an academic discipline?
“Data Scientist,” you see, is a job title. An attractive title. A title that really sparkles on a business card. A title for cool and interesting work.
Case in point: management consulting. Seemingly half of my college classmates went into this field. But their B.A.’s were in political science, French, mathematics, and so on. “Helping other organizations with strategic decisions” has no specific disciplinary tradition, no distinctive set of analytical tools, no well-defined object of inquiry—in short, there’s no “there” there.
Mastering an academic discipline, as opposed to completing a vocational degree, means becoming an expert in some object of human interest: markets (economics), life (biology), literature (English), abstract argumentation (philosophy) or really abstract argumentation (mathematics). The management consultant is, by design, a generalist. An expert in nothing.
Data science’s expertise cannot be the tools of data analysis. Those tools emerge from Statistics and Computer Science. For expert-level depth and rigor in understanding such tools, you go to the makers, not the users.
