SHOCKED. I am SHOCKED that a company full of biased people who don't think they're biased wrote a biased algorithm.https://twitter.com/danieljkelley/status/1161261463530614784 …
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This is a great point. "Algorithm" does seem a bit insufficient when you're talking about huge distributed systems displaying emergent behavior that tracks the emergent behavior of the people who created them.https://twitter.com/mbessey/status/1161708260769972224?s=20 …
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The term might be "heuristic", if you use Stafford Beer's definitions. Algorithm: a set of instructions for reaching a known goal. Heuristic: a set of instructions for searching out an unknown goal by exploration.
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My internal shorthand is a heuristic is a strategy for finding an algorithm.
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This is interesting! Beer spends a lot of time talking about how algorithms can produce heuristics, and vice versa, and how this figures into cybernetics.
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(This is all in The Brain of the Firm)
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As he points out, "we tend to live our lives by heuristics, and to try and control them by algorithms".
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And, rather presciently, "the need for [heuristics] arises once the computer becomes alive with fast-flowing information". And "if the goal is not recognized in detail, an heuristic is required, so the computer must be supplied with an algorithm determining an heuristic".
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He gives path-finding as an example of an algorithm specifying a heuristic. We don't know where the highest point is, we know how to construct a heuristic that might find it.
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So TL;DR yes, I think that is a good shorthand!
End of conversation
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