Helping other data scientists leads to LESS competition, not MORE!
People are afraid of competition. This is normal, it's a matter of survival. By adding the famous quote "information is power" to the equation, sharing information can seem risky. I mean, why would someone share their knowledge for free if this is the same as giving power to a potential competitor (to beat him/her in the game)?
This is a common conclusion, which I've heard a few times and after some thinking I can now affirm for sure: IT'S WRONG.
First of all, let's think about our Data Science / Machine Learning bubble. We have people sharing tutorials in Medium, posting their Machine Learning models on Kaggle, answering people's questions on StackOverflow and so on. If you think about it, this is how our community has grown so fast. We helped others, we spent hours and hours sharing everything we learned online for free. Even big companies, such as O'Reilly and Springer editors, are helping the community for free — I bet you've already read some of their books online, haven't you?
Perhaps due to the internet advance, we are living now something that we've never seem before in terms of sharing knowledge. And if you think about it, instead of slowing people's growth, this actually helped both those who share information and who only consume. It's pretty hard to get this contrafactual, but I strongly believe that by sharing knowledge, we are making the Data Science area develop much more than it would if we kept the information for us.
Let's think about it?
By sharing these great tutorials, we are providing more good data scientists to the market. By having more good data scientists, companies start to notice the importance of data professionals. So this leads to more companies starting their own data science area, which then increases the number of positions, also increasing the salary.
In a parallel universe, people wouldn't share any Python tutorials, book publishers wouldn't share anything for free and only a few people would learn data science. This would lead to less companies perceiving our value, which would then lead to a world with much less data science positions and perhaps a lower salary.
I know it's hard to think about this contrafactual and I probably used some premises that some folks will not agree with; but I hope I could convince some of you that providing the data science community with your knowledge is good. By helping others, you are helping yourself and I reckon this is the most convincing argument I can use.
