The Monomyth of Data Analysis

Every charlatan hawking a boot camp is trying to convince you that they, and they alone possess the roadmap for your data analysis project, and they’ll sell it to you for only a few thousand dollars. With the aid of cutting-edge 1950s anthropology, I’ve discovered that all these two-bit hucksters are all really selling the same thing. Now, I present for the first time, the real story of data analysis.

Main idea: There area all these flowcharts for how to do data analysis but it seems kind of silly to think that any one of them really tells us the only way to do data analysis. They’re not really better than any other storytelling structure that happens to have a beginning, middle, and end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey#:~:text=In%20narratology%20and%20comparative%20mythology,comes%20home%20changed%20or%20transformed.

Call to Adventure

You have to solve a problem

Refusal of the call

There’s not enough data

Supernatural aid

Data collection

Crossing the threshold

You actually get up the courage to open your SQL client and run a select *, then you go get some coffee

Belly of the whale

This data all looks crazy

The road of trials

None of the assumptions you made were even a little bit right

Meeting with the Goddess/Temptress

We beseech the deities of statistical theory for answers, but many of the possibilities we come across are easy choices that would produce bad results

Atonement with the Father

Atonement with the father: RA Fisher’s ghost is sad about your choices but whatever

Up, up in his perch in asymptopia (where all old statisticians go when they pass on; where the sample sizes are infinite and the standard errors are arbitrarily small), the eternal soul of RA Fisher glowers down at you from a cloud of slightly racist pipe smoke

Apotheosis

The Ultimate Boon

Obtaining parameter estimates and their standard errors/Deriving the joint distribution

Refusal of the return

You came up with such a nice solution that you briefly consider being a theorist instead of a statistics code monkey, then you realize that that doesn’t pay very well

The Magic Flight

Computers give us useful estimates of complicated theoretical shit

Rescue from without

Weakened from your journey, you call upon a database administrator to do the hard stuff

Crossing the Return Threshold

Master of the two worlds

Freedom to live

You retire in contented peace, a sagely halo illuminating your visage, until

Call to Adventure

Your boss taps you on the shoulder and politely asks where that report is on that thing