A really interesting interview in Jacobin:
One reason I think biases are not more commonly flagged is the enormous disconnect between the way that data is collected and the people who are in charge of building algorithms. Data scientists are well-educated technologists, who often have no experience getting stopped and frisked, for example. They’re taught to be technicians, in fields like math, computer science, and statistics, and to keep the consequences of their work at arm’s length.
They also work in companies and organizations that benefit from the marketing spiel that claims scientific objectivity and fairness, so there’s little pressure to be sure that what they’re doing is, in fact, unbiased. Instead, there’s an unspoken assumption in many start-up companies that whatever is profitable must be good for the world. So while inequality is increased by WMDs, I think it’s also one of the reasons WMDs exist in the first place.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/big-data-algorithms-math-facebook-advertisement-marketing/
Categories: Archiving Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science
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