“Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” – Edward De Bono
A few years ago, I read a story about an experiment done by Elizabeth Newton of Stanford University called “Tappers and Listeners”. The experiment had two groups of people; Group A consisted of Tappers who had to Tap certain songs (like “Happy Birthday”, “Jingle Bells”) and not sing it aloud. Group B consisted of Listeners who had to guess the song. The Tappers were quite confident and said that 50% Listeners should be easily able to guess the song. As part of the experiment 120 songs were tapped out and a measly three songs were guessed correctly.
The Tappers know the song and it is playing in their mind while they are tapping; they keep thinking this is easy why is the listener not able to guess the song. The Listener on the other hand just hears a bizarre Morse Code (dots and dashes) and tries quite hard to guess the song. The experiment showcases it is not so easy to explain something (which you understand quite well) to someone else; this is called “The Curse of Knowledge”. As an academician for 9 years, I have taught Technology to Non-Technical folks, and I faced this challenge. In the initial few years I used to see blank faces, the students for sure were thinking, “what is this guy saying”. It is not easy to explain some of the complex Technical concepts even to people with a technical background (a different level with Non-Technical folks) and over time I had to learn and change the way I teach many concepts.
There is a wonderful quote by Albert Einstein which sums up this problem quite beautifully – “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
Now that I have bored you with all the gyaan 😊, it is time to get to the point. The purpose of this article is to showcase the simplicity of my Book – “Master The Mystic Arts” (MTMA); a book focused on Analytics and Data Science. The world of Analytics/Data Science is like Magic to many people. MTMA is my humble attempt to change the way one looks at Data Science/Machine Learning viz. Complex, difficult and many a times “out of this world”. To explain the complex concepts of Analytics/Data Science I utilize relatable examples of “The Sorting Hat” (Harry Potter you see), Cooking in everyday life, Tom Riddles Diary, “Kindergarten Cop” and many other movie references like “Avengers”. Though Data Science cannot exist without mathematics hence I have tried to maintain a small balance. My aim is for anyone (Muggles = Non-Data Science folks) to be able to pick up my book and understand the concepts. I hope the final output is unique, something different, and appreciated by many.
I leave you with one final Movie reference “Bawarchi” where Rajesh Khanna echoes the words of Rabindranath Tagore – “It is so simple to be Happy, but so difficult to be Simple”. In other words, complexity can be broken down only with the help of simplicity and that is what I have attempted with my book.
If you are a Kindle Fan you can grab a copy of my book on Amazon, if you prefer the print version you can order it from Pothi.
Amazon Kindle
Print Version Pothi
