This was a fascinating conversation with a remarkable communicator and activist, Jas Chambers. One of the themes that keeps recurring in this podcast is how richly varied the backgrounds and educations are of many of the interviewees. Our education system tends to push the “what you study in year 10 will define your life” line, but it’s so untrue.
I” love data. I love noodling with it and nerding with it. What I’m excited about in terms of the data community is this thinking about ethics in data. That data for its own sake is numbers on a page, but back to what we were talking about. Am I bringing bias into this? What is this going to be used for? Who is it for? Who is it looking at? The ethics piece around that, I think drives us towards greater inclusivity.”
“I’m excited about that aspect, and as people become more data literate, what you start to understand is just how connected everything is. The planet that we live on is a closed system. Outside of asteroids and meteorites dropping in here, we generally sit in this bubble. It means there is no “away”. There’s nowhere that stuff that we make goes. We don’t go anywhere. We stay on this planet, and everything gets reused. Understanding that, being more inclusive in our thinking about data, and really questioning the ethics of it, I think really leads people to understand that connectivity.”
“I remember my first day at university, I was one of those overly friendly people who introduced myself to everyone in a lecture theatre of a thousand and never saw those people again. I remember sitting there in that first term, one of the lecturers did say ‘just be aware. we are another species, we’re an animal, but the data would suggest that we’re not going to be as successful as the dinosaurs.'”
