Highlights from How Data Happened by Chris Wiggins
/ 8 min read
Title: How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms
Author: Chris Wiggins
Stars: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭒⭒
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 10:03:12 AM
why, then, are so many methods for analyzing social data developed without the involvement [of] social scientists?”
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 10:04:53 AM
Will large quantities of data transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what “research” means?
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 10:06:07 AM
“The inclination is to replace people with data trails, turning them into more effective shoppers, voters, or workers to optimize some objective.
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 10:10:03 AM
People who live in low-rights environments—poor and working-class communities, migrant communities, communities of color, religious or sexual minorities—are already living in the digital future, especially when it comes to high-tech surveillance and discipline.
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 10:16:29 AM
Accountability in this context includes an obligation to report, explain, or justify algorithmic decision-making as well as mitigate any negative social impacts or potential harms.18
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 10:16:55 AM
Tackling the dangers and promise of algorithmic systems demands concentrated political action, capable of affecting who data empowers and who it does not;
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 10:21:56 AM
Data is made, not found, and the process of procuring and analyzing it often dramatically loops back to shape the people under official scrutiny.24
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 10:24:07 AM
Whatever its limits, making information about major institutions available using quantitative measures has been, since the nineteenth century, a formidable tool to check state and corporate power, particularly the opacity of expert decisionmaking in organizations.
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 7:15:42 PM
The critics of numerical statistics at the end of the Enlightenment well understood that data is profoundly artificial.
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 7:16:49 PM
War required money; money required taxes; taxes required growing bureaucracies; and these bureaucracies needed data.
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 7:17:12 PM
Statistics was originally knowledge of the state and its resources, without any particularly quantitative bent or aspirations at insights, predictive or otherwise.
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 7:18:21 PM
Then, as now, numbers were political.
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 7:18:52 PM
Statistics was initially a new technology for states at a moment of increasing industrial, commercial, and martial competition.
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 7:21:31 PM
Having moved dramatically away from its qualitative roots, the term “statistics” came to incorporate, on the one hand, the accumulation of data, primarily numerical data, about everything from people to climate, and on the other hand, a set of powerful, beguiling, and often misused mathematical tools to draw conclusions and analyze data.18
Date: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 7:22:19 PM
The birth of statistics in the modern sense comes from the realization that fusing data and mathematical analysis could serve power—but also, at times, could check power.
Date: Thursday, December 19, 2024 3:21:33 PM
Education would never be enough, for there were simply not enough gifted men and women, not enough born geniuses, to confront the complexity of the times.
Date: Thursday, December 19, 2024 3:39:07 PM
the less able, and the less energetic, are more fertile than the better stocks.”
Date: Thursday, December 19, 2024 4:01:56 PM
one fails to embed this data analysis within broader forms of knowledge, scientific and humanistic alike, that so-called knowledge should
Date: Thursday, December 19, 2024 4:02:04 PM
one fails to embed this data analysis within broader forms of knowledge, scientific and humanistic alike, that so-called knowledge should be seen as incomplete at least, dangerous at worst. Yearning for Causes—of Racial and Class Difference,
Date: Thursday, December 19, 2024 4:02:16 PM
one fails to embed this data analysis within broader forms of knowledge, scientific and humanistic alike, that so-called knowledge should be seen as incomplete at least, dangerous at worst.
Date: Thursday, December 19, 2024 4:09:03 PM
Statistics doesn’t simply represent the world. It transforms how we categorize and view the world. It transforms how we categorize others and ourselves. It changes the world. And, as we’ll see, contemporary data science does this—at hyperspeed.
Date: Thursday, December 19, 2024 4:14:31 PM
Yule claimed the data showed that financial assistance causes poverty to increase.
Date: Friday, December 20, 2024 6:21:16 PM
“The widespread, fruitful, and successful races of the future belong to the dominant nations of to-day; and nations are rendered dominant principally by the loyalty, enterprise and cooperative ability of the people who compose them.”
Date: Sunday, December 22, 2024 12:09:51 PM
The Bletchley effort culminated in the creation of what some historians consider the world’s first “computers” in the contemporary sense of the word: digital, electronic, and programmable machines, called the Colossus.
Date: Sunday, December 22, 2024 2:23:34 PM
from airline reservations systems in the 1960s, industry began
Date: Monday, December 23, 2024 12:22:50 PM
Before data reigned, rules did.
Date: Monday, December 23, 2024 12:30:51 PM
“The more intelligent one is, the more often he should be able to learn from an experience something rather definite; e.g., to reject or accept a hypothesis, or to change a goal.”
Date: Monday, December 23, 2024 12:37:17 PM
By the mid-1970s, artificial intelligence research had undergone a shift from attempting to replicate human intelligence in a general way to attempting to replicate expert knowledge.
Date: Friday, December 27, 2024 10:06:00 PM
Rather than attempting to replicate genius generalists, replicate specialized experts.
Date: Friday, December 27, 2024 10:08:47 PM
“Mastery is not acquired by reading books—it’s acquired by trial-and-error and teacher-supplied examples.
Date: Saturday, December 28, 2024 12:12:34 PM
So digital computers gained both speed in performing computations and, more importantly for our story, scale in collecting, processing, and storing data.
Date: Saturday, December 28, 2024 12:38:45 PM
Computers and telecommunication capabilities have expanded the opportunities for Federal agencies to use and manipulate personal information.
Date: Saturday, December 28, 2024 5:34:47 PM
“Those who deal with records that can brand and divide must modify their actions toward the best long-range interests of society,
Date: Saturday, December 28, 2024 5:45:16 PM
Storing data, for all its challenges, proved far easier than analyzing data for insight. In an era with only minor limits on the collection
Date: Saturday, December 28, 2024 5:45:42 PM
Storing data, for all its challenges, proved far easier than analyzing data for insight.
Date: Saturday, December 28, 2024 5:49:23 PM
insistence of the creation of robust algorithmic systems capable of dealing with real world data, not artificially clean data, at ever-larger scales, often in real time.
Date: Sunday, December 29, 2024 11:13:33 AM
Making predictive systems with real-world data required sometimes ugly engineering.
Date: Sunday, December 29, 2024 11:20:29 AM
“Rather than asking an expert for domain knowledge, a machine learning algorithm observes expert tasks and induces rules emulating expert decisions.”
Date: Sunday, December 29, 2024 9:08:57 PM
made this work seem more computationally plausible. A parallel computer involves a large number of processors working on the same problem rather than a single or small number of very powerful processors working individually.
Date: Sunday, December 29, 2024 9:14:42 PM
Their labor in classifying, right and wrong, provided the “ground truth” for the algorithmic models to try to predict based on these enormous—for the time—data sets.33 After
Date: Sunday, December 29, 2024 9:17:13 PM
Machine learning, especially machine learning using neural nets, was rebranded as AI by corporate consultants and marketers, sometimes to the discomfort of researchers.
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 10:55:56 AM
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 10:59:46 AM
specialization is for engineers.*
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 11:24:43 AM
An open-source language R based on S became a dominant platform for computationally orientated statisticians and especially for work in graphical analysis and presentation.
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 4:12:30 PM
“Exploration means looking around, observing, describing, and mapping undiscovered territory, not testing theories or models. The goal is to discover things we neither knew nor expected.”
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 4:14:19 PM
“The most impressive and useful demo” of the group “is the super search engine, called Google, built by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.”
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 4:57:50 PM
If too much data was the problem, it also offered great opportunity.
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 5:04:10 PM
It’s one thing for Netflix to make bad recommendations, quite another to advance grounds for surveillance, drone strikes, or worse.
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 5:05:20 PM
order to understand what automation does to human activity,” insists the scholar Antonio Casilli, “we must recognize and estimate first the amount of work inscribed into automation itself.”42
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 5:08:41 PM
choosing, improving, and making data interpretable.”45 Applying machine learning to the world requires data, even automatically collected data, to be made usable.
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 5:29:33 PM
The point is not to condemn data science tools—it’s to use them more appropriately, and with an appreciation for their limits. When Mahalanobis
Date: Monday, December 30, 2024 5:30:49 PM
the scope of data science has expanded, so has the realization that data can be a powerful force when applied not only to playing games of chess and go, or distinguishing photographs of dogs and cats, but when applied to human problems when harms and justice are at risk.
Date: Tuesday, December 31, 2024 7:44:49 AM
- Respect for personhood: the idea that individuals’ autonomy should be respected;
- Beneficence: minimize risk of harm to individuals, maximize public benefit;
- Justice: fair distribution of risk and benefits.
Date: Tuesday, December 31, 2024 7:48:24 AM
“The Web” is often given the birthday of August 6, 1991, when Tim Berners Lee posted to a Usenet group about “the WorldWideWeb project.”
Date: Tuesday, December 31, 2024 7:50:19 AM
ETHICS AS A SERVICE