From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

How do we empower people to foster dialogue?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

How do we empower people to foster dialogue?

(techno music) - How do we empower people to look at all sides of a challenge instead of Googling something and looking at the first website that pops up? - These are the questions of today of how do we have good dialogue? How do we take out the heat on a conversation of these types? I remember after Ferguson getting together with police chiefs and officers and people from the Black Lives Matter community and other civic activists and the families that were impacted, getting them in a room, to actually have a discussion. The way you start with those conversations is first just trying to remember that we all have something in common. We all want a better world for our kids and our kid's kids. And reasonable people can disagree. And sometimes the hardest problems don't have an answer that's easy. Hard problems are hard. And what you try to do is you try to advance our understanding to get to a better problem, to get to a better answer, to get to another thing. The tragedy that we have right now is that people aren't willing to engage in discussion that is, has the ability to take out the heat. The ability to actually just, let's talk about the data. Let's talk about your experience. Let's not say your experience means nothing because my data doesn't reflect it. The thing that makes a great data scientist fundamentally is actually not just the ability to do analysis. It's the ability to communicate, it's the ability to empathize, the ability to reach across and understand how this data is going to actually impact. You can't just say your job ends with a chart, that's insufficient. The place we learn about this is the liberal arts. We learn how to think about what it is to be human and how do we interact as cultures. The three things I teach almost every single day to scientists I get to work with is I say there's three things that we need to make sure and have an answer for. Number one, what do we want somebody to take away from this? What are they supposed to take away? Number two, what action do we want them to take? Is it a retweet, is it we want them to look deeper at it, ask another question, is it to read more stuff, what is it? The third, which is almost seems antithetical to this is how do we want them to feel? Excited, passionate, and there's a debate and people probably are thinking out there oh no what you, it was supposed to be cold, it was supposed to be objective. Actually, what we found is when you put emotion into it it starts and stirs a dialogue. Now you have to also provide context around that, that's how you manage it. But when you bring that together and you start talking and using data to foster dialogue. Data is not supposed to be the end. Just like the scientific process, there is no end. It is a continuous cycle of increasing sophistication around things. The best people who use data, use data to foster a dialogue, to advance to the dialogue, to engage more, engage deeper, to ask richer questions, to bring more people into the conversation. (techno music)

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