How To Be Better Than ChatGPT At Data Science

Well now that we have your attention, hopefully we can introduce you to the fascinating field of Social Science which might offer some insights about the central question in this post - How to be better than ChatGPT at Data Science?.

While the field of Social Science is very broad and has been shaped by contributions from a wide array of academic disciplines, in this post we would like to draw attention to the work of two psychologists.

In his book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds,” by Michael Lewis we are taken on a journey into the fascinating lives and friendship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

One may ask, what is so special about this friendship?

• These two men literally changed how people think about how people think.
• Their work directly led to great advancements in the fields of Social Science and Behavioral Economics while also shaping many other domains that involves human beings (which as you can imagine is pretty much every field including Data Science).
• These men were polar opposites:

  • Amos was an optimist, night owl, funny, organized & always sure he was right.

  • Daniel was a perennial worrier aka pessimist, early riser, disorganized & always sure he was wrong.

  • Quite remarkably, it is the close collaboration between these polar opposite men between 1971 & 1979 that resulted in eight papers which ultimately resulted in Daniel's Nobel Prize & also his international best seller Thinking, Fast and Slow.

  • Less is more: They published ~1 paper per year which was groundbreaking and original. As Lewis explains, since they are opposites they had to agree on every single sentence which was painstakingly written and rewritten iteratively.

    

Since Data Science is ultimately about helping humans make better decisions using "data" and "science", we believe that familiarizing yourself with the work of Amos & Daniel as a starting point while going deeper on topics that interest you will make you better than ChatGPT at the human aspects of Data Science.

It is only fitting to let Daniel & Amos have the final words in this post:

Daniel Kahneman

"An investment said to have an 80% chance of success sounds far more attractive than one with a 20% chance of failure. The mind can't easily recognize that they are the same."

"It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern."

"By their very nature, heuristic shortcuts will produce biases, and that is true for both humans and artificial intelligence, but the heuristics of AI are not necessarily the human ones."

"If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do."

Amos Tversky

"The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours."

"People pay an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment."

"It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on."

"Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not "corrected" as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted."

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