Allen Downey’s keynote at posit::conf(2024)
Maybe things aren’t as bad as I think. Or, maybe they are. Who knows?
Allen Downey gave a keynote address at the posit::conf(2024) conference this year. I’ve followed his writings (e.g., Think Python and Modeling and Simulation in Python) for quite a while and have been inspired by his clear explanations and talent for making tricky quantitative concepts more understandable.
His blog, Probably Overthinking It, is packed with thought provoking explorations of a wide range of probability and stats problems. No wonder the blog led to a book of the same name.
Recently, he released yet another book, Elements of Data Science, which introduces data science to those with little to no programming background. It has its roots in work he did while visiting at Harvard which led to this paper.
So, when I saw he was giving a keynote at this year’s Posit conference, I knew it would be good. Then I forgot about it. Thankfully, he posted a link in LinkedIn to the slides from his talk. The title is “A future of data science” and I can tell that the slides were created with Quarto - it’s my new goto for slidemaking. And of course, the keynote delivers. It hits home on many levels, but none more so than the topic of doomscrolling and the question of how the world is really doing. As an amateur student of nature, there seems to be quite a bit of actual doom that is warranted. For now, I’ll leave it at that and try to follow his lead in doing more careful analysis of things.
I’m mostly making this post to remind myself to read more of AD’s work and do more analysis of things that I find interesting and important. That’s what the great teachers do - inspire us to keep learning. Thanks AD.
Citation
@online{isken2024,
author = {Isken, Mark},
title = {Allen {Downey’s} Keynote at Posit::conf(2024)},
date = {2024-08-15},
url = {https://bitsofanalytics.org//posts/dow24pos/dow24pos.html},
langid = {en}
}