Seeing the science in startups

The short step from academia to hackademia

A page in Charles Darwin’s notebook in which he sketches his hypothesis for the origin of species. Credit

At the end of 2017 I finished a PhD in neuroscience at University College London and plunged into data science work at a series of startups.

The transition from academia to industry brought with it a variety of new experiences, such as enjoying a free, functioning coffee machine in your workplace, people caring what time you turn up for work, and worrying about how the organisation you’re part of is going to make money (the profitability of universities tends not to weigh heavily upon the minds of scientists).

But in the end, I found that the two weren’t so different after all.

What do scientists do?

The invention of the scientific method is often credited to Francis Bacon, who was part of the brave gang of 16th century polymaths who realised that believing something really hard didn’t necessarily make it true.

Science is a cycle of hypothesis forming and breaking. According to Karl Popper, arguably the 20th century’s answer to Francis Bacon without the same flair for hats, we should be trying to state our beliefs and then falsify them. By repeatedly disproving our ideas about the way the world works, we hopefully home in upon a better description of reality.