I get your point too :-) Currently in IRC is much discussion due to 1.0 release. But generally traffic is lower. I look at IRC logs sometimes, and I have never seen much discussion about data science. Most is compiler dev, bugs, game dev, crypto. And some noise.
My feeling is, when someone starts a discussion and there is someone other interesting in that, than a longer discussion follows. zcharter does this often, for his game engines. So you may just try to start a data science discussion when there is no important other discussion on IRC and see if there are other people. But maybe some other people will join this thread, so we will see. I am interested in science too (working on rtree bulk loading and k nearest neigthbor search just now), but I will never join a separate channel.
