"Data" Professions - what's the shittiest

moving on from discussion here - Democratic (Party) Direction - regarding Kamala Harris tweeting about "risk assessment" and the Weapons of Math Destruction book that talks about how fucked up those risk assessments can be, I feel it is important to note that building models and algorithms for social applications is just as fraught as the self-driving car shit. GIGO definitely still applies and the amount and relative quality of data is still way too sparse and shitty to be using it as a substitute for ground truth in policy making.

the point is removing some human/judge discretion can lead to more fairness and less punishment, which is the opposite of cathy oneill's fears (that the algorithms will just reify discrimination in a black-boxed gigo way and amplify it potentially in some sort of positive feedback loop)

― flopson

let's talk about the work the word "can" is doing in your first sentence. understand that cathy o'neil is a data scientist and not a luddite, and she certainly is not saying "let's just do everything manually". shit, back when they were imposing mandatory minimums people made the same sort of arguments about them, that "objective standards" would lead to greater fairness in sentencing. "objective standards", or "algorithms", or whatever terminology you want to use, _can_ and _have been_ racist, and starry-eyed technocratic idealists have consistently, and continue to consistently, ignore the racist ways in which their "objective" technological "innovations" can be and are put to use.

Algorithms were created by people, and embody the values and biases of the people who created and implement them.

It's just another way of saying you, personally, your cadre, your class, has the "objective truth". God, weapons, science, economics, now algorithms.

xp- u seem mad

if u want to "look at the work "can" is doing" in that sentence (u can fuck off with this angry scare-quoting and bad faith sub-undergraduate "close-reading" of my posts btw) maybe read the working paper i posted that literally showed an algorithm was less racist than judges in determining whether defendants should await trial at home or in jail

fwiw i think Weapons of Math Destruction is a great book and take its warnings extremely seriously, but it absolutely has flaws and was written very "early" in this process of shifting-human-discretion-to-algorithms so a lot of future research will inevitably prove some of its concerns wrong (while also elucidating others). Cathy herself takes a similar position on it fwiw

sry didn't mean to get aggro--just, pls don't jump down my throat or read something into what i was writing that wasn't there

no worries i'm disinclined to get into an online shouting match over, well... it's a semantic argument. we don't actually disagree about anything specific here as far as i can see and there's not really a lot to talk about.