Twitter at the speed of parenting
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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It's like the beginning of a horror sci fi novel. "At the time we wouldn't admit our systemic and unconscious bias. When the Internet became conscious, it didn't either but we learned at the wrong end of its rifles, with ruthless efficiency."
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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