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Thales, a little known Greek philosopher became the world's first data scientist by correctly making agricultural forecasts using data on natural phenomena. Thales' radical thinking make him a fabulously wealthy and began our path to the brave new world of Big Data. Find out how the principles uncovered by Thales in ancient Greece can shape how we think about data, technology and business today.
Citation preview
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