[homework] Reading & experience report

[beijn]

Asking

• [x] Ask ChatGPT for help completing this homework

Feeling, Writing, Thinking

• [x] Post an experience report (a paragraph or several) as a comment on this issue. This experience report should convey what motivates you to understand and practice data thinking. An experience report may describe a collection of experiences (which may or may not relate to data), and some questions to consider may be helpful: What were you or those involved feeling? Doing? Thinking? Asking? Where were they? What systems were involved, if any? Who would you want to better understand the incentives at play?
  • if you are stuck, ask for help on Zulip, come to office hours, make a plan of tasks to do and ask for feedback on the plan
  • try using dictation on iPhone, Android, computer, and ask ChatGPT to summarize it
  • ask Lex for ideas or ChatGPT for ideas
  • edit using https://hemingwayapp.com/, Grammarly, or any other tool to help
  • read the below articles for ideas

Doing

• [x] Review the first class: https://panopto.ut.ee/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx?folderID=43bb180c-79a6-4324-b055-afa400ecd1a0 - ask on Zulip if you can't access this
• [x] Review the Figma whiteboard from the first class: https://www.figma.com/file/SsoNLhaZwnSGkADd4eS0D8/230220-introduction?node-id=0%3A1&t=jR2hISrDchAPapYR-1
• [x] Create a LinkedIn profile. (If you are not comfortable using your real name, feel free to use a fake name + email)
• [x] Post your LinkedIn profile on Zulip -- Zulip is open source and enables us to analyze our chat messages with natural language processing tools such as ChatGPT, which we will do later in the course!
• [x] Read https://matt.might.net/articles/how-to-email/ to understand principles of communication over email or Zulip
• [x] Read parts of the Mailchimp Style Guide (https://styleguide.mailchimp.com/voice-and-tone/ or https://styleguide.mailchimp.com/writing-principles/) to understand how written communication can be guided by principles
• [x] Read https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/on-worry to understand a professional writer's perspective on writing.
• [x] Read https://every.to/chain-of-thought/writing-essays-with-ai-a-guide to understand how to use voice recording, dictation on your smartphone or computer, and ChatGPT, and Lex to help you write
• [x] Read https://simonwillison.net/2022/Dec/5/rust-chatgpt-copilot/ to understand how ChatGPT and CoPilot can help you learn data thinking, programming, and statistics skills
• [x] Read http://web.archive.org/web/20170208134519/http://storyshots.tumblr.com/post/25032057278/22-storybasics-ive-picked-up-in-my-time-at-pixar -- especially the "Once upon a time" story telling framework Pixar used for its movies.
• [x] Read https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome to help understand concepts that can increase our psychological safety and trust in class and how asking ChatGPT can help reduce our fear of asking for help when stuck.
• [x] Read https://jaan.io/my-friend-radicalized-this-made-me-rethink-how-i-build-AI/ to learn about my journey in understanding the incentives that can affect our thoughts, feelings, and actions in society and the incentives that affect how AI such as ChatGPT is built.

Programming & Infrastructure

• [x] Create a GitHub Codespace using the data thinking template here (from https://github.com/onefact/datathinking.org-codespace)
• [x] Send a screenshot to Zulip of a plot you made in the GitHub codespace (of any dataset or data you generated as in the live coding demo from the first lecture; ask for help if this is unclear)
• [x] Sign up for Lex - message Jaan on Zulip for an invite code
• [x] Sign up for Figma as a student (https://www.figma.com/education/students/)
• [x] Install copyq on Windows Powershell or Linux using Chocolatey, or install Maccy on Mac using Homebrew. This will save you a lot of time throughout the class as you copy and paste things from ChatGPT!

[beijn]

Experience Report: Data Journey on Something Politically Relevant

This is purely human text.

Visualizing data is a powerfull tool to implant ideas in peoples heads. Sensing and understanding by one self is much more transformative than just telling results (though still weaker than shared narration).

These were my scrapped ideas

• The Cost of A Vote

  • How much do political figures invest in convincing people? Does the ‘price of a vote‘ increase to either end of the politcal spectrum?
  • Data is only easily available for US (here), but not for other countries.
  • Data is highly incomplete since a lot of costly political manipulations happens of the tracks and through private actors.
  • ChatGPT gives randomized orderings of political parties from left to right every time I asked.

• War in the Ukrain and Safety in Africa

  • The war is definitely negatively impacting access to basic life goods and therfore maybe also violence and safety in African countries. maybe see here
  • Much data is available at humdata.org by UN.
  • Data is mostly too old to reflect the war.

In the end I went for the classic Happiness, Economic Growth and Environmental Damaging. As outlined in the notebook I’m quite suspicious of the data from the Footprint Network and dependents like Happy Planet Index, because of the paralysing or counterproductive conclusions from it and the limited data availability and interoperability. While data and visualizations are a powerfull tool to make people understand, the effort can quickly go into the other direction. Narratives are much more transformative. Narratives must be backed by appropriately differentiated analysis to not be propaganda if they are wrong. But doing this analysis requires collaboration and understanding of society and a FAIR foundation for reproducible, open and easy data and research access.