How to Be Authentic (as a Data Scientist)
Be honest and avoid getting into trouble.
The internet is full of fake accounts, photos, videos, you name it!
Non-authentic professionals are everywhere (especially in the field of data science, ML, and AI). There are people who clone entire projects and put them in their resumes, and even YouTubers who pretend to be experts when they only plagiarize other experts’ stuff.
If you aren’t authentic, you might get into trouble one day. Here are some things you can do to be authentic as a data scientist.
Give Credit and Don’t Plagiarize
Copying isn’t the same as plagiarism. Here’s how Wikipedia defines the word plagiarism:
“Plagiarism is the representation of another author’s language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as one’s own original work.”
To keep it simple, if you copy somebody’s stuff and claim it’s yours, then most likely you’re plagiarizing.
Why is this important for you? Well, this is a problem that some data scientists face.
Last year I came across Ken Jee’s article “The Plague of Plagiarism in Data Science”. There he describes how his work was plagiarized. Someone copied the code from one of his videos, made it into an article, and published it on Medium without any accreditation.
Fortunately for him, Ken Jee didn’t reveal his name, otherwise his reputation could’ve been damaged.
How can you avoid this?
Simple! Give credit to the original author. This might save you from damaging your reputation not only as a data scientist but as a professional.
For example, when I gave the definition of the word “plagiarism” I quoted Wikipedia, so I didn’t take credit for it. I also gave credit to the guy who took the photo above. Simple right?
As a rule of thumb, if you copy and paste text as it is, then you should quote it or give credit, but if you take a piece of it and create a completely different thing, you should be safe without crediting.
Here’s another example that will show you how this can damage your reputation.
I think most of you know the story of the YouTuber “Siraj Raval.“ He was accused of copying/pasting entire academic papers and using other’s people code without properly crediting (claiming it was his job).
Months later, he’d published a “My Apology“ video explaining how he made his YouTube videos.
He said,
I would spend my time on Github and look for code I think is useful and once I found some, I download it, reupload it to my Github and then put the name of the author at the very bottom of my Github.
Here comes the best part:
Then I would make a YouTube video about that code to make more people interesting in it, but inside video itself I would say, hey this is the code, I won’t name the author, and sometimes I would say this is my code.
Most likely, this damaged his career. Getting back your image and reputation takes a lot of time.
Talk About Things You Know (If You Know Little, Do The Research)
We should learn to say “I don’t know” more often.
At school, university and work, we’re punished if we say those words, so we avoid even thinking that we know little or nothing about a topic.
If you try to be an expert in something you don’t know and don’t even do the research, sooner or later people will find out and might see you as a fraud.
An example of this might be Siraj Raval. People used to see him as an expert in some fields that apparently he knew little about. That said, not only big influencers can damage their reputation. There are less-known people on Medium that talk about things they know little about.
I remember reading an article about the differences between Machine Learning and Deep Learning that had many wrong facts. As you might expect, some readers noticed this and attacked the author in the comments.
The author, instead of doing the research and editing those wrong facts, created a second account with a fake name and photo profile (in an attempt to get back his reputation, I’d say).
Months later, I found this person “cloned” the landing page I use for collecting emails.
Noticed I wrote “clone” because I used a free template for the landing page (basically anyone can use the template as they want). That said, the fact this person took my PDF cover and put his name on it makes this wrong.
Steve Jobs once said:
Good artists copy; great artists steal
I doubt he literally meant stealing ( let alone cloning) but to find things you like, learn from others, take their ideas, make them your own and create something new with them.
If you copy this article, create a new one, paste all this content and publish it under your name without asking for permission, that’s stealing. But if you take some sentences, and add your own thoughts, that’s a new piece of content. You’re creating something new!
You know what’s the worse part of stealing/cloning content? You’re also getting other people’s mistakes. My landing page looks good but has some flaws. A couple of months ago, I discovered that it works poorly on mobile devices. The person who cloned it also cloned these flaws.
Remember, no one has anything figured out!
If you copy an entire data science project, you’re also copying all its flaws, and you might only identify them in a job interview.
That’s it! Be authentic and find the best version of yourself. You’ll be surprised by what you’re capable of.