On the Curse of Knowledge, the opportunities and risks of AI, and why data scientists need to speak the same language as business. A look back on Season Two of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter

Data Malarkey - the podcast about using data smarter

After our second set of six great guests, it’s a wrap for Season Two of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations – recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, between March and May 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University

Tim Jobson, Consultant in Internal Medicine at Somerset Foundation NHS Trust and Medical Director of Predictive Health Intelligence

Sam Michelson, Founder & CEO of Five Bocks – Intelligent Digital Reputation

Elizabeth Press, Creator & Owner of the D3M Labs (Data-Driven Decision-Making) blog

Stijn Gimbrère, MD of Media Futures Market

Jean-Baptiste Bouzige, Founder & CEO of Ekimetrics

Steve Pinker gives a brilliant explanation of the Curse of Knowledge – the difficulty in imagining what it’s like not to know something that you know – from its origins in experimental psychology. Digital reputation management expert, Sam Michelson, shows how dangerous the Curse can be in business.

One of the main challenges for using data smarter is that ‘data people’ speak a different language – and are motivated and remunerated for different reasons – from others in a business or organisation. D3M Labs blogger, Elizabeth Press, details the consequences of failing to address this.

AI is changing how many organisations work, and Ekimetrics’ Founder & CEO, Jean-Baptiste Bouzige, is already applying AI tools among his 400-strong army of data scientists. Pinker is more sceptical – about how it works and whether it will solve the world’s biggest, thorniest problems.

Using data smarter accelerates performance in every sector, and in this season – and this season wrap-up episode – we also hear from health software pioneer, Tim Jobson, and Stijn Gimbrère, a man on a mission to clean-up the often murky and fraudulent online advertising market.

Data Malarkey is back with Season Three from 27 September, and there’s a glittering array of guests from an increasingly diverse set of professions. We’ll be hearing from women and men at the top of their game from the worlds of screenwriting, diversity and inclusion, and forensic science; from market research, digital marketing, and AI. Their common approaches to using data smarter have lessons for us all.

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.