The First Data Scientist

forgotten lessons from ancient greece about

winning with data

Data Ignorance: When markets or organizations fail to collect, study and apply data.

Thalesian Opportunity: Competitive advantage gained from the data ignorance of a market or competitor.

Anatomy of Thalesian Opprotunity

Find a Heuristic to Challenge: If there is something that everyone assumes cannot or does not need to be measured…go measure it.

Mine Your Data: Once you gather enough data go study it carefully.

Deploy a Strategy: Identify a way to monetize the insight you gained using an indirect approach.

Who is Thales and why does he

matter to the modern world?

Thales of Miletus - First western philosopher

- First data scientist - First oil tycoon

Miletus (far from America)

1st Y

ouTu

be C

at

Vide

o (2

005a

d)

0

Thal

es L

ives

(624

bc)

Time and Progress

In Thales’ day, everyone thought

everything was the will of the arbitrary

and capricious gods.

“You know what this calls for? This calls for more #thunderbolt.” - @BronzedOlympianGod

“Cause & effect. Ha! More like cause & #thunderbolt” - @BronzedOlympianGod

“Last mortal to RT this gets a free #thunderbolt” - @BronzedOlympianGod

Think Status Quo.

“Wht if everything ISN’T caused by #thunderbolts #randomthought” - @Philosobro

“Rain = more olives. 4 reals #revelation #science” - @Philosobro

“btw #science = stuff caused by something not #thunderbolts” - @Philosobro

Think Different.

In 624 b.c., everyone was in the oil business

Olive oil was used for everything

Lamp light

Delicious foods

Money!

For several years, Thales collected

data on weather, animal behavior, celestrial bodies

et.

One year, he studies his data and decides to

make a forecast.

“I’ve got scrolls full of data and I’m thinking big year for olive crops #bigdata” - @Philosobro

Thales’ contemporaries

were deeply skeptical of his fancy learning.

“Every1 knows only random #thunderbolts from gods make plants grow. #lunatic ” - @WaitAPeasent

“@philosobro less #thinking and more #thoughtlesstoil” - @JavelinJunkie

“Any bros want to get naked, cover yourself in oil and wrestle me this weekend? @Philosobro @JavelinJunkie” - @GreeklySpeaking

A quick note.

Thales’ recorded his observations about nature in his scrolls and

thereby created the first

database.

Thales recorded data on

everything from weather to solar

activity. His analysis of this data is the first

data mining effort.

While oracles had been making

predictions for hundreds of

years, Thales’s made the first

data based, scientific forecast.

The Prehistoric Olive Oil Supply Chain

FarmOlive Press

Storage

If you were Thales and knew

the olive crop would be large, what would you have done do to

capitalize?

Thales Rents All the Olive Presses in Miletus

At harvest, everyone in the

region had to pay Thales to use the

olive presses.

He became massively wealthy.

“Getting rich is soooo easy when you have data. #Thunderbolts are crap.” - @Philosobro

“Swimming in my vault of gold coins #ScroogeMcDuck style.” - @Philosobro

Thalesian opportunities are everywhere.

10010100110101001010111001010100011

10010100110101001010111001010100011

100101001101010INSIGHT1011100101010

10010100110101001010111001010100011

10010100110101001010111001010100011

Hidden in mounds of ignored data…

Or in mundane activities no one measures…

I

N

S I

G H

T

Are opportunities in every field for anyone curious enough…

To question.To measure.To explore.

Think about this:

Camera Speake

r

Gyroscope

Accelerometer

GPS

Clock

That’s 6 sensors, capable of recording millions of bytes of information every second.

But more important.

High Speed Internet

Connection

All that data is sent over the internet and kept in a place like…

It’s a data party and everyone is invited!

To clarify…

Amount of data Thales could access

Amount of data you can

access!

Yikes!

(Probably not to scale)

All this data…more data generated this year alone than the whole of human history combined.

Thales found a fortune in just a few scrolls of handwritten data.

We have Excel, cloud computing, open source data mining programs, public data and API access.

What can you discover?

Remember these lessons…

Be curious where others are disinterested

Be innovative where others are stagnate

Be thorough where others summarize

And always remember…

Data

is

KingMore interesting things at Decisionmediaworks.com