Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Gutierrez:
What do you look for in other people's work?
Wiggins:
Creativity and caring. You have to really like something to be will-
ing to think about it hard for a long time. Also, some level of skepticism. So
that's one thing I like about PhD students—five years is enough time for you
to have a discovery, and then for you to realize all of the things that you did
wrong along the way. It's great for you intellectually to go back and forth from
thinking “cold fusion” to realizing, “Oh, I actually screwed this up entirely,” and
thus making a series of mistakes and fixing them. I do think that the process of
going through a PhD is useful for giving you that skepticism about what looks
like a sure thing, particularly in research. I think that's useful because, other-
wise, you could easily too quickly go down a wrong path—just because your
first encounter with the path looked so promising.
And although it's a boring answer, the truth is you need to actually have tech-
nical depth. Data science is not yet a field, so there are no credentials in it yet.
It's very easy to get a Wikipedia-level understanding of, say, machine learning.
For actually doing it, though, you really need to know what the right tool is
for the right job, and you need to have a good understanding of all the limita-
tions of each tool. There's no shortcut for that sort of experience. You have
to make many mistakes. You have to find yourself shoehorning a classification
problem into a clustering problem, or a clustering problem into a hypothesis-
testing problem.
Once you find yourself trying something out, confident that it's the right thing,
then finally realizing you were totally dead wrong, and experiencing that many
times over—that's really a level of experience that unfortunately there's not
a shortcut for. You just have to do it and keep making mistakes at it, which
is another thing I like about people who have been working in the field for
several years. It takes a long time to become an expert in something. It takes
years of mistakes. This has been true for centuries. There's a quote from the
famous physicist Niels Bohr, who posits that the way you become an expert
in a field is to make every mistake possible in that field.
Gutierrez:
What's been the biggest thing you've changed your mind about?
Wiggins:
That's a tough choice. There are so many things that I've changed
my mind about. I think probably the biggest thing I've changed my mind about
is the phrase that you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I think if you really
care about something, you'll find a way. You'll find a way to learn new tricks if
you really want to.
The other thing that I've changed my mind about is that I grew up, like most
academics, with the sense that scientists somehow functioned with some
orthogonal value system that was different than the world. I think one thing
that I've changed my mind about in this area—but this is over like a 20-year
period since I was not yet a PhD, is that scientists are human beings too,
whether they know it or not. And that science is done by scientists, and
