The motion debated was: 

“In data science, domain expertise is more important than machine learning skill.”

The topic emerged from conversations over dinner the previous night, with Kaggle’s Jeremy Howard, LinkedIn’s Monica Rogati, and some pre-debate musings of Google’s Hal Varian.

To constrain the question, we added an additional clarification: which of these would you favor more in hiring your company’s first data scientist?

This sounds like a great idea for a session at a conference/event where you have a lot of knowledgeable people