This wasn’t entirely serious, but I do think academics have a tendency to overcomplicate things. There seems to be this idea that if you go to college for 10 years, then surely what you know can’t be learned by someone from Wikipedia in a few hours right? This doesn’t hold for everyone working at a university and there are some notable exceptions, but I think academics could have a much greater impact if they made an effort to explain their ideas to general audiences.

My view is that there is nothing in data science one can’t learn on her own with an internet connection and that the biggest barrier is simply the vocabulary. Once you break down the concepts into pieces, each one by itself is readily understood. From there, you just build up an understanding until you have a working knowledge of what seemed to be a complex topic.