Statistical Imaginaries: An ode to responsible data science(zephoria.substack.com)
zephoria.substack.com
Statistical Imaginaries: An ode to responsible data science
https://zephoria.substack.com/p/statistical-imaginaries
5 comments
Thanks for writing this, I was going to skip over this initially because the presentation style and its length. This talk was well worth watching.
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Fascinating article. Video version of this talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSdGG6wEE9k
Ugh. A lengthy rambling politically charged rant with a thinly veiled call to make science the handmaid of ideology. Not an ode by any stretch of imagination.
Signed, Samuel L. Clemens
By the way, Merry Christmas
Signed, Samuel L. Clemens
By the way, Merry Christmas
one of my constant bugbears is even finding other data people who can and will take into consideration the context and uncertainty around the data itself, for in our societies and with our current levels of education and numeracy, there seems to be an bordering mystical connection between data, numbers, and authority. even beauty products, junk science, and conspiracies will often try to convince you with numbers.
and the struggle of how, as a data scientist and statistician, to use numbers in policy with largely innumerate policy makers and populations is an ongoing friction.
for an example on the inherent politics of numbers from my own country, observe the following from our official statistics office:
https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mf/1370.0
note the date of last publication. this work was subsequently cancelled and will no longer be updated. I'm not here to say whether that was right or wrong, but merely to draw awareness to this tension.
meanwhile, while I was working in official stats, we were always extremely frustrated by the conspiracy theories around the likes of unemployment statistics or cpi. while all stats are inherently political, the amount of bad or invalid critiques of these statistics, as well as the implications that we were trying to generate then in some kind of conspiratorial bad faith was always disappointing.