[Bartweiss]

> A while ago there was a Kaggle project to solve certain conjectures on prime number theory. Seriously?

I've seen a surprising number of Kaggle projects setting (or claiming to achieve) objectives that look impossible - things like extracting complex insights from such short signals that they apparently violate the pigeonhole principle.

The worst demonstration was looking at the results of a college class with "do a Kaggle project" as the final task. It was painfully obvious that all of the 'best' results were either extreme overfitting or fake data science (that is, using a strong algorithm to start and getting no gains from training).

Which means that many of the soon-to-graduate students had concluded that good data science meant getting strong results, not producing reliable and novel insights. It felt a bit like a software-centered version of what social psychology has been suffering from.