Slanted publicity for data science?

The trailer for data science offered a prospectus focussed largely on wishful advantages, rather than the balance necessarily suggested by historical experience. ¹ Their yet unexamined ‘examples’ have potential, ‘primarily’ because of enabling ‘management of greater numbers of patients at lower cost’ and provide clinicians with ‘the gift of time’. Experience suggests that the first posited benefit will inevitably gobble up the second.

We have been here before, with the late John Swales’ advocacy of the need to integrate evidence from biological science, clinical medicine and statistical methods, in order to establish ‘The credibility of any single piece of evidence’. ² He wrote as ex-Director of NHS R&D.

The relevant abstract feature of data science is the deliberate attempt of intellectual ‘Reach’ to exceed its ‘Grasp’. ³ For that reason, an explanation of analytical output may not be possible. Controversies around the utility of, say, randomised controlled trials have rehearsed the querulousness to be expected over future recommendations from data science.

There are well-recognised implications for medical practice, especially the attribution of formal and informal responsibility. Experienced clinicians have proved to be suspicious of more conventional medical decision support, in part because the effortless, unexplained, ‘rabbit out of the hat’ feels inconsistent with their scrupulous defence of patient interest. Inexperienced clinicians are likely to abbreviate further their personal clinical repertoire and reduce their competence to manage the impromptu presentations of disease. Typically, clinicians have rescued a relatively simple practical insight from the analysis of data, rather than come to depend on the examination of each scenario.

The authors quite ignore the uncertainties discussed in the third reference. ¹ The caveats are actually well rehearsed in expert circles and it is disappointing to find so little caution in their wishful thinking about data science. This is still technology in search of useful applications.