From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

What is the fear associated with data?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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What is the fear associated with data?

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(electronic music) - I'm not a fan of horror films, generally. But I think there's been a number of documentaries where I go, oh, I never thought about the problem that way. That's much bigger than I appreciated. One of the biggest things that I think is a challenge for example, there's these insight data science fellows who looked at along the coast of New York, and they found all the EPA's, basically all the sites where the EPA should investigate and then they measured, they compared it to where things are going to flood, based on the next hurricane. And how should you prioritize where the EPA inspector should go first? And I just thought, that is a brilliant use of both climate data, and EPA data, and local state data, 'cause now it's like, yeah these are the spots that if those supplies are not secured, and there's a flood, which there inevitably will, that's where we're going to have a toxic sludge. What freaks me out about that I guess, is well, now that we know that, what are we doing about it? It's interesting, we have all this data from the EPA and yet we want to refute it. Or we want to hide it. But, science doesn't care, mother nature doesn't care, it's going to happen. And so us just trying to ignore the data, doesn't make the problem go away. That's being data-stupid. It's just trying to ignore everything. And there's this argument in there of that we could question the data to ad nauseum, but it's super clear-cut. And so how do you make sure that people see it? Vaccines is the other one. There are neighborhoods near where I live, where the school rates for vaccination are incredibly low. So low that if somebody with measles visited, several of the kids would die, just because we're ignoring the basics of what we've learned as a society. (electronic music)

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