Someone needs to bring reason and logic to this mass movement to solve all problems with data, and that task should fall to the statistician. Now, I realize that data sets are collected and analyzed by practitioners in many fields, but statisticians are the only professional group educated specifically to ask (and, hopefully, answer) the deep questions about data quality, reliability, and validity, and to seek optimal solutions to data production and analysis that can apply across a wide range of applications. At present, it may be true that statistics is more in demand than are statisticians, but there are plenty of opportunities for the latter. It is high time we expand our numbers so that we can meet the ever-increasing need for statisticians in the information age.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education