To be fair their special skill can be actively dangerous. In the same way that my devops skills can also be dangerous. Disclaimer: I've periodically been doing data science since before it was called that.
DevOps skills don't help define public policies with gibberrish and baseless assertions disguised as facts extracted from data.
Sometimes some so-called data scientists appear xaman interpreting numerical bones and plotted fire shapes generated from compuational peyote, and people interpret those conclusions as answers to their problems.
Data science as such isn't really a thing that defines public policy. That's more the realm of classical statistical analysis. Althogh there are some major flaws in classical statistical analysis too, such that risks of types 1 and 2 errors are far too high.
