Integrity

Oxford Dictionary definitions of integrity are: 1. the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness. 2. the state of being whole and undivided.

I cannot think of a better topic to start off this blog with than a discussion of integrity. And although “moral uprightness” is a valid definition, I recognize that ultimately all morality is subjective. I do not want us to go down that rabbit hole, so let us examine the second definition of “being whole and undivided” as it relates to humans.

This word, to me, means a measure of one’s wholeness. Every time I do something that I think is incorrect, whether consciously or subconsciously, I feel a little less whole. Compromises are a fact of life, so what integrity means, in simplest terms, is a measure of being uncompromising on things that relate to your core values.

Most people would agree that integrity is a positive attribute. We, humans, find comfort in predictability and reliability. These are perfectly summarized by a person with integrity, whose actions can be predicted once you discover the inner values system they use. Person without integrity, is unreliable, and by extension untrustworthy. If they cannot stick to following their own guiding principles, how can we count on them when push comes to shove?

Life is a messy thing, and a pitfall we have is not recognizing lack of integrity when we see it.

In business, I see it all the time. I worked in law, in advertising, in tech startup, and in all of those areas I noticed that business leaders, by and large, are perfectly willing to bend their core values to achieve a goal. We call this attribute flexibility or entrepreneurship, and I think it is toxic as hell.

I must note that without some flexibility, nothing would ever get accomplished. What I am talking about is less of a spring flex and more of a bungee jump levels of flexibility that we have gotten accustomed to recently. Video game developers release unfinished games and then milk you for money on buying content that should have been included in the first place. Cell phone manufacturers mark up their product 30% above the competition because you and all your data is already locked into their system and they make it hard to leave. Everyone, literally everyone, claims to use AI, ML, deep neural networks to do projects that any expert can easily see does not require more than a linear regression because the client will pay more for these keywords.

Chasing profits is a function of the business professional, but the degree to which we got accustomed to reaching the goal line without integrity is terrifying. People are largely mistaken about what current technology can and cannot do because marketing stopped educating them and started fooling them.

From darknet data privacy conspiracy nuts to layman believing that AI revolt is right around the corner, this data scientist gets unimaginably dumb questions every single day. And I truly welcome these questions, because I believe we need to have a conversation, we need someone to answer what really is instead of feeding you some company line about progress or efficiency of a new useless algorithm.

Well, settle in. Information on this blog will be raw, sometimes poorly researched, and probably quite often, extremely emotional. But I promise you, it will be delivered with integrity to the end user and hopefully will spark people with access to the data and the decision makers to make a change.

To that end, I challenge you, the user, to inform me, chastise me and praise me as appropriate with facts and data in your arguments if you see me failing or succeeding to capture the essence of what I am talking about.

The hope is for the world to return to a state of integrity, to recognize that not all discoveries have to be positive or comfortable, and to leave this profits-hungry psycho-babble that is the current climate of misinformation behind in favor of facts over unqualified opinion, even if it is my own. I am here to learn together with all of you.