Subject
15 entries
Critique
Bookmarks
Goodbye, Data Science
A practitioner's exit essay arguing that 'data science' as a job title is broken — structurally positioned between engineering and analysis in a way that makes it chronically undervalued and poorly defined. Resonated widely in the data community in late 2022.
AI Winter Is Well On Its Way
Filip Piekniewski's 2018 blog post predicting an AI winter due to deep learning's fundamental limitations — a contrarian view written before the GPT era proved the scaling hypothesis. Useful as a document of expert skepticism that turned out to be largely wrong.
What I'm Frustrated by in Crypto
Amir Bolous's honest critique of crypto circa 2022: most on-chain activity is speculation, not genuine problem-solving, and the space has abandoned basic startup discipline around product-market fit. A well-reasoned internal critique from someone who remains cautiously optimistic.
Where Are All the Crypto Use Cases?
Evan Conrad's honest accounting of where crypto actually has product-market fit versus where it remains speculative — distinguishing genuine use cases (remittances, stable stores of value in unstable economies, DeFi primitives) from overhyped narratives. A useful 2022 checkpoint for crypto skepticism with an insider's eye.
Keep the Web Free: No to Web3
A manifesto from the Yesterweb community arguing against Web3 — identifying it as predatory marketing, concentrated power under decentralization rhetoric, artificial scarcity, and a regressive wealth transfer mechanism. The clearest statement of the old-web skeptic's case against crypto.
Web3 Is Going Just Great — Jan 15, 2022 Entry
A specific incident entry from Molly White's Web3 Is Going Just Great, cataloging a crypto/NFT failure from January 15, 2022. The site is the canonical running ledger of web3's broken promises and outright frauds.
The Worrisome Rise of NFTs
Nautilus magazine's critique of NFTs at the height of the 2021 boom — covering environmental harm from proof-of-work blockchains, manufactured scarcity, and the disconnect between NFT hype and actual value creation. Science journalism applying a skeptical lens to speculative tech.
Arweave — Be Careful
A Reddit warning thread about Arweave, the permanent decentralized storage blockchain. The 'be careful' framing captures the skepticism that arose alongside Arweave's speculative hype during the 2021 storage-chain boom.
Web3 Is Going Just Great — Main Site
Molly White's Web3 Is Going Just Great — the canonical running timeline of crypto/NFT/web3 failures, scams, and disasters. First bookmarked when the site launched in December 2021, before it became widely cited.
The Oxymoron of "Data-Driven Innovation"
Chelsea Troy argues that 'data-driven innovation' is internally contradictory — data can only confirm what you already know to measure, and genuine innovation requires bets on things you can't yet measure. A sharp critique of how tech teams use data to avoid hard decisions.
Big Data Was Supposed to Fix Education. It Didn't. It's Time for 'Small Data.'
A 2016 Washington Post argument that big data initiatives in K-12 education have failed to improve learning outcomes — and that the alternative is 'small data': teachers knowing individual students qualitatively rather than tracking them at population scale.
Why Machine Learning Fails
Louis Dorard's analysis of why machine learning projects fail in practice — usually not because the algorithms are wrong but because the problem setup, data quality, or evaluation approach is broken. The engineering side of ML is where most projects die.
Everything Wrong With P-Values Under One Roof
A comprehensive critique of p-values and null hypothesis significance testing — cataloguing the ways researchers misinterpret and misuse them. Part of a growing 2013 literature on the replication crisis and statistical reform.
Why We Hate Infographics (And Why You Should Too)
Qunb's critique of infographics — arguing that most fail because they prioritize visual novelty over clarity, substituting decoration for information. A data visualization purist's case for charts that communicate over charts that impress.
Entrepreneurship's dirty little secret
Alan Gleeson's contrarian take that entrepreneurship is oversold as a career path — arguing that actively discouraging unfit founders would produce better outcomes than the blanket glorification of starting a company. An uncomfortable but useful corrective to startup culture's hero narrative.