Maybe you should try to understand even the most basic concepts before you embarrass yourself massively by mansplaining about common sides, enemies and who is allowed to judge you.
Learning it by doing it is a good approach, try to do competitions at www.kaggle.com or www.drivendata.org, at least Kaggle has some tutorial-style entry level competitions.
In what way does that read like an onion article? Is thinking about users to determine what data product to build in what way laughable in any way to you?
Oh god the paranoia in this email...how is someone wanting to improve their tool capitalism or a business model. Maybe it's just someone trying to ... oh I don't know ... making their product better by understanding how it's used?