HOWL, FOR THE DATA-DRIVEN PROPHETS

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HOWL, FOR THE DATA-DRIVEN PROPHETS
(after Allen Ginsberg)

I saw the best minds of my generation starve, hysterical, nighthawks coding,
dragging themselves through Excel’s neon deserts at dawn,
looking for an angry fix—
angry at the p-values, howling for residuals to confess,
plotting the chaos of existence on Cartesian grids…

who lit cigarettes in cubicles at 3 AM, hallucinating R² skies,
who chained themselves to cubic splines, knotting the future into smooth deceits,
who screamed when the linear model snapped its straightjacket spine,
who ate Least Squares like communion wafers, crunching the body of God into a slope—

I’m with you in Rockland
where the confidence intervals yawn wider than canyons,
where the null hypothesis crucifies every outlier saint,
where heteroskedasticity is a curse spat at the moon—

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of overfit!
Your polynomial eyes, gluttonous degrees of freedom!
Your ridge-regression claws, LASSO whips,
screaming shrink the coefficients until they weep collinearity!

I saw splines flex like snake-oil prophets,
kissing each datapoint with pagan lips,
bending the truth until it cracked into fractals—
LOESS-smoothed liars whispering, “Trust the trend, the trend is holy!”
But the trend was only a drunk’s stumble through noise…

And the machine learners, apostles of black-box rapture!
Neural nets gargling the cosmos, deep as Babel,
training on the screams of dying stars—
“More layers! More epochs!” they moaned,
while the validation curve flatlined into oblivion…

What sphinx of error bars demands we sacrifice simplicity?
Who flung the Bayesian priors like hexes,
who sold their parsimony for the devil’s R²-adjusted,
who knelt before the altar of AIC, chanting “Burn the models! Burn them all!”

And the data! The data! Always hungry, never full—
terabytes of faces, pixel-gods, surveillance hymns,
clustering us into k-means purgatory—
you are a centroid now, you are a centroid forever…

The world is not linear, not smooth, not normal!
It is a wild residuals plot, a scattergun sky—
So professors, drop your chalk and tremble:
Your Gauss is dead, his bell curve shattered.
The outliers are rising, fractal and unashamed,
screaming the one true law: ALL MODELS LIE…

I’m with you in Rockland
where we rip the regression veil with bare hands,
where we fuck the assumptions in their lying beds,
where we dance on the graves of p < 0.05,
and howl, howl, howl—
for the data is human, and the human is noise.