Digifesto

February 17, 2015

data science and the university

This is by now a familiar line of thought but it has just now struck me with clarity I wanted to jot down.

  1. Code is law, so the full weight of human inquiry should be brought to bear on software system design.
  2. (1) has been understood by “hackers” for years but has only recently been accepted by academics.
  3. (2) is due to disciplinary restrictions within the academy.
  4. (3) is due to the incentive structure of the academy.
  5. Since there are incentive structures for software development that are not available for subjects whose primary research project is writing, the institutional conditions that are best able to support software work and academic writing work are different.
  6. Software is a more precise and efficious way of communicating ideas than writing because its interpretation is guaranteed by programming language semantics.
  7. Because of (6), there is selective pressure to making software the lingua franca of scholarly work.
  8. (7) is inducing a cross-disciplinary paradigm shift in methods.
  9. (9) may induce a paradigm shift in theoretical content, or it may result in science whose contents are tailored to the efficient execution of adaptive systems. (This is not to say that such systems are necessarily atheoretic, just that they are subject to different epistemic considerations).
  10. Institutions are slow to change. That’s what makes them institutions.
  11. By (5), (7), and (9), the role of universities as the center of research is being threatened existentially.
  12. But by (1), the myriad intellectual threads currently housed in universities are necessary for software system design, or are at least potentially important.
  13. With (11) and (12), a priority is figuring out how to manage a transition to software-based scholarship without information loss.
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February 17, 2015

a brief comment on feminist epistemology

One funny thing about having a blog is that I can tell when people are interested in particular posts through the site analytics. To my surprise, this post about Donna Haraway has been getting an increasing number of hits each month since I posted it. That is an indication that it has struck a chord, since steady exogenous growth like that is actually quite rare.

It is just possible that this means that people interested in feminist epistemology have been reading my blog lately. They probably have correctly guessed that I have not been the biggest fan of feminist epistemology because of concerns about bias.

But I’d like to take the opportunity to say that my friend Rachel McKinney has been recommending I read Elizabeth Anderson‘s stuff if I want to really get to know this body of theory. Since Rachel is an actual philosopher and I am an amateur who blogs about it on weekends, I respect her opinion on this a great deal.

So today I started reading through Anderson’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Feminist Epistemology and I have to say I think it’s very good. I like her treatment of the situated knower. It’s also nice to learn that there are alternative feminist epistemologies to certain standpoint theories that I think are troublesome. In particular, it turns out that those standpoint theories are now considered by feminist philosophers to from a brief period in the 80’s that they’ve moved past already! Now subaltern standpoints are considered privileged in terms of discovery more than privileged in terms of justification.

This position is certainly easier to reconcile with computational methods. For example, it’s in a sense just mathematically mathematically correct if you think about it in terms of information gain from a sample. This principle appears to have been rediscovered in a way recently by the equity-in-data-science people when people talk about potential classifier error.

I’ve got some qualms about the articulation of this learning principle in the absence of a particular inquiry or decision problem because I think there’s still a subtle shift in the argumentation from logos to ethos embedded in there (I’ve been seeing things through the lens of Aristotelian rhetoric lately and it’s been surprisingly illuminating). I’m on the lookout for a concrete application of where this could apply in a technical domain, as opposed to as an articulation of a political affinity or anxiety in the language of algorithms. I’d be grateful for links in the comments.

Edit:

Wait, maybe I already built one. I am not sure if that really counts.

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