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What does social science have to offer the data industry?

towardsdatascience.com

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Re: What does social science have to offer the data industry?

#11

Post by thraway180306 »

seandougall wrote: post #8
corporateslaver wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways couldn’t that be considered social engineering through ai? If the training set shows bias and this so does the algorithm, it’s a reflection of reality. Manually changing the algorithm to influence society on a grand scale is dystopian. It’s a dangerous path that sounds humanitarian but is really authoritarian.

The problem is that algorithms tend to amplify bias, rather than just reflect it. We’re constantly being told (implicitly or explicitly) that we should trust ML because computers are objective, but that ignores many of the most important variables in the training set. Google’s Deep Dream is a great way to visualize this. Given a source image that you repeatedly feed through an algorithm that attempts to parse and rec…

DeepDream is an apt example on a deeper level of analogy. What they wanted was an advance in the important topic of interpretability/explainability. Offshot of a failed experiment turned into the subfield of style transfer and pretty pictures. That became a success of AI somehow, one to talk about and dazzle audience with.

About the OP ignorance, well, statistics started off as a social science, so maybe self professed data scientists while looking into social sciences, ethics and psychology, could also look about history.

Re: What does social science have to offer the data industry?

#12

Post by zaphar »

eksemplar wrote: post #6

I think there is an important lesson in the approach to science that we see in the social sciences. Coming from a technical background we approach science, and data, as being the fundamental way of discover truth, but with humans there are often more than one truth. We’ve seen the effect of it in management over the past 25 years. Today a good manager is expected to approach a team, not by instructing them in what to…

Except that they still can't do what the author needs in order to do her work. A tool she can use. Social Sciences have not yet produced anything that can effectively produce a change or even adequately describe a social system.

Her tagline is appropriate. She'll gladly use a tool that works, but she won't use one on faith.

Re: What does social science have to offer the data industry?

#13

Post by SiempreViernes »

nonbel wrote: post #9
eksemplar wrote: post #6

I think there is an important lesson in the approach to science that we see in the social sciences. Coming from a technical background we approach science, and data, as being the fundamental way of discover truth, but with humans there are often more than one truth. We’ve seen the effect of it in management over the past 25 years. Today a good manager is expected to approach a team, not by instructing them in what to…

>"If I look at all the alcoholic families in my municipality and compare their case history with big data gathered on a national level, I’ll certainly be able to predict how many of their children we’ll need to remove. I just can’t predict which ones because determinism doesn’t actually work on something that complex. [...] I think we need to learn from the social sciences, because they work much more with the compli…

The gas law is a equilibrium condition, so if you change one the others must change too. But they don’t change spontaneously, you impose the change from without, so there is no ambiguity: whatever you force to change first will be the cause of the others changing.

Re: What does social science have to offer the data industry?

#15

Post by AndrewKemendo »

The field of Economics, especially behavioral economics, is probably trying the hardest to develop means of measurement for social phenomena.

At the end of the day though if you want to do data, then you have to have something which you can measure. So far social sciences have not been able to agree on a consistent observable metric for comparison.

Until we can figure out something measurable from first principals then social phenomena will be measured by proxy. Observational data about how people act is the closest we can come today to trying to determine why people act.

Re: What does social science have to offer the data industry?

#16

Post by mathinpens »

seandougall wrote: post #8
corporateslaver wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways couldn’t that be considered social engineering through ai? If the training set shows bias and this so does the algorithm, it’s a reflection of reality. Manually changing the algorithm to influence society on a grand scale is dystopian. It’s a dangerous path that sounds humanitarian but is really authoritarian.

The problem is that algorithms tend to amplify bias, rather than just reflect it. We’re constantly being told (implicitly or explicitly) that we should trust ML because computers are objective, but that ignores many of the most important variables in the training set. Google’s Deep Dream is a great way to visualize this. Given a source image that you repeatedly feed through an algorithm that attempts to parse and rec…

Your example doesn't make sense-like at all-

If you want an example about bias look at Compass and recidivism

Re: What does social science have to offer the data industry?

#17

Post by nonbel »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #13
nonbel wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"If I look at all the alcoholic families in my municipality and compare their case history with big data gathered on a national level, I’ll certainly be able to predict how many of their children we’ll need to remove. I just can’t predict which ones because determinism doesn’t actually work on something that complex. [...] I think we need to learn from the social sciences, because they work much more with the compli…

The gas law is a equilibrium condition, so if you change one the others must change too. But they don’t change spontaneously, you impose the change from without, so there is no ambiguity: whatever you force to change first will be the cause of the others changing.

Right, the model accounts for all possible "causal routes", turning causality into something subjective.

Re: What does social science have to offer the data industry?

#18

Post by AndrewKemendo »

amelius wrote: post #14

Since the data industry is using repeated real-life experiments on humans, can't we say that the data industry IS social science (or part of it)?

I'd go further to say that the data science community is doing social science better than the SocSci community in this regard.

The problem here is that because data science is industrially driven, there is no separation between measurement and influence. So, whereas academic sciences try not to influence behavior, but rather understand it, data science is trying to influence user behavior with understanding and ethics as an afterthought.

Re: What does social science have to offer the data industry?

#20

Post by paultopia »

I think the author forgets that there are quantitative as well as qualitative social sciences. An anthropologist like the author might think that ethnography doesn't have much to offer (though that seems dubious to me too, I'm no expert). But what about econometrics, item response theory work from psych, field experiments and "natural experiments" work from political science, network analysis work from sociology. Social science methodologists have contributed to a lot of the same things industry data scientists work on.
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