Same thing for engineers IMHO. Where I come from the title is regulated, so it requires a bachelor's degree with a specific list of courses and 2-3 years of work experience as a junior engineer in the specific field to call oneself "engineer". But in the country where I work, there are plenty of people with no programming experience who can setup a wordpress site or grab a Microsoft certification and instantly become "system engineers"...

Thats why my card says "Computer Scientist". :-) People ask what that means a shockingly often fraction of the time! They ask "so what do you?", I say "computer science", they then ask "what parts?", I reply "all of it". Thats of course ignoring the conversations where they then ask what computer science is or how thats different from programming or setting up a web server. those chats are tough :)

In general, it is highly inappropriate to title yourself a scientist without a PhD. A 20 year old undergraduate with an enthusiasm is not a biologist. You claim to hate the dilution of the title, yet have upgraded yourself without earning it by either mastery produced via a doctorate or via a proven professional track record.

Maybe you should consider titling yourself software engineer or program developer until you've produced something that shows mastery to the world.

you're making claims based upon social convention, but I do not see any evidence that you have authority with respect to making such claims.

The issue with the phrase "data scientist" is that it is overused, is highly ambiguous in what people mean when they say it, and when someone identifies themselves as such does not communicate any clear lower bounds on expectations of relevant background and skill.

This is not an appropriate fora for getting into an argument about what formal training vs autodidactism (i have plenty of both) is sufficient for being a scientist of one sort or another.

I am open to hearing reasoning that isn't based upon institutional validation. There are many scientists whose work is not in the domains which they had formal training, eg Oded Schramm, Cosmo Shalizi. They could be considered amazing scientists, but surely they were scientists by intellectual inclination even before they did their great work, and likewise successfully defending their phd's didn't make them scientists, it merely gave them the title of doctor!

Calling oneself an engineer of software is misleading in my mind, because in many countries engineer is legal certification of reliability.

Calling myself a program developer would be a gross misrepresentation of what I do, so i do not call myself that. I solve hard problems and build better tools for solving hard problems.

As for showing mastery to the world, I care not, open source is great, but ability to self publicize, or have great open source projects, have absolutely no relationship with being a good computer scientist, though they work synergistically together in a wonderfully positive way.

At the end of the day, everything is some sort of social convention, and the folks who I respect would consider me a computer scientist, and thats good enough for me.

have a great rest of your day on the internet good sir.