Data Skeptic

Algorithms are pervasive in our society and make thousands of automated decisions on our behalf every day. The possibility of digital discrimination is a very real threat, and it is very plausible for discrimination to occur accidentally (i.e. outside the intent of the system designers and programmers). Christian Sandvig joins us in this episode to talk about his work and the concept of auditing algorithms.

Christian Sandvig (@niftyc) has a PhD in communications from Stanford and is currently an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Information at the University of Michigan. His research studies the predictable and unpredictable effects that algorithms have on culture. His work exploring the topic of auditing algorithms has framed the conversation of how and why we might want to have oversight on the way algorithms effect our lives. His writing appears in numerous publications including The Social Media Collective, The Huffington Post, and Wired.

One of his papers we discussed in depth on this episode was Auditing Algorithms: Research Methods for Detecting Discrimination on Internet Platforms, which is well worth a read.

Today's episode begins by asking how many left handed employees we should expect to be at a company before anyone should claim left handedness discrimination. If not lefties, let's consider eye color, hair color, favorite ska band, most recent grocery store used, and any number of characteristics could be studied to look for deviations from the norm in a company.

When multiple comparisons are to be made simultaneous, one must account for this, and a common method for doing so is with the Bonferroni Correction. It is not, however, a sure fire procedure, and this episode wraps up with a bit of skepticism about it.

A recent paper in the journal of Judgment and Decision Making titled On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit explores empirical questions around a reader's ability to detect statements which may sound profound but are actually a collection of buzzwords that fail to contain adequate meaning or truth. These statements are definitively different from lies and nonesense, as we discuss in the episode.

This paper proposes the Bullshit Receptivity scale (BSR) and empirically demonstrates that it correlates with existing metrics like the Cognitive Reflection Test, building confidence that this can be a useful, repeatable, empirical measure of a person's ability to detect pseudo-profound statements as being different from genuinely profound statements. Additionally, the correlative results provide some insight into possible root causes for why individuals might find great profundity in these statements based on other beliefs or cognitive measures.

The paper's lead author Gordon Pennycook joins me to discuss this study's results.

If you'd like some examples of pseudo-profound bullshit, you can randomly generate some based on Deepak Chopra's twitter feed.

To read other work from Gordon, check out his Google Scholar page and find him on twitter via @GordonPennycook.

And just for fun, if you think you've dreamed up a Data Skeptic related pseudo-profound bullshit statement, tweet it with hashtag #pseudoprofound. If I see an especially clever or humorous one, I might want to send you a free Data Skeptic sticker.

Today's mini episode discusses the widely known optimization algorithm gradient descent in the context of hiking in a foggy hillside.

This episode is a discussion of data visualization and a proposed New Year's resolution for Data Skeptic listeners. Let's kill the word cloud.

Today's episode is a reading of Isaac Asimov's The Machine that Won the War. I can't think of a story that's more appropriate for Data Skeptic.

In this interview with Aaron Halfaker of the Wikimedia Foundation, we discuss his research and career related to the study of Wikipedia. In his paper The Rise and Decline of an open Collaboration Community, he highlights a trend in the declining rate of active editors on Wikipedia which began in 2007. I asked Aaron about a variety of possible hypotheses for the phenomenon, in particular, how automated quality control tools that revert edits automatically could play a role. This lead Aaron and his collaborators to develop Snuggle, an optimized interface to help Wikipedians better welcome new comers to the community.

We discuss the details of these topics as well as ORES, which provides revision scoring as a service to any software developer that wants to consume the output of their machine learning based scoring.

You can find Aaron on Twitter as @halfak.

Today's topic is term frequency inverse document frequency, which is a statistic for estimating the importance of words and phrases in a set of documents.

Early astronomers could see several of the planets with the naked eye. The invention of the telescope allowed for further understanding of our solar system. The work of Isaac Newton allowed later scientists to accurately predict Neptune, which was later observationally confirmed exactly where predicted. It seemed only natural that a similar unknown body might explain anomalies in the orbit of Mercury, and thus began the search for the hypothesized planet Vulcan.

Thomas Levenson's book "The Hunt for Vulcan" is a narrative of the key scientific minds involved in the search and eventual refutation of an unobserved planet between Mercury and the sun. Thomas joins me in this episode to discuss his book and the fascinating story of the quest to find this planet.

During the discussion, we mention one of the contributions made by Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier which involved some complex calculations which enabled him to predict where to find the planet that would eventually be called Neptune. The calculus behind this work is difficult, and some of that work is demonstrated in a Jupyter notebook I recently discovered from Paulo Marques titled The-Body Problem.

Thomas Levenson is a professor at MIT and head of its science writing program. He is the author of several books, including Einstein in Berlin and Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist. He has also made ten feature-length documentaries (including a two-hour Nova program on Einstein) for which he has won numerous awards. In his most recent book "The Hunt for Vulcan", explores the century spanning quest to explain the movement of the cosmos via theory and the role the hypothesized planet Vulcan played in the story.

Follow Thomas on twitter @tomlevenson and check out his blog athttps://inversesquare.wordpress.com/.

Pick up your copy of The Hunt for Vulcan at your local bookstore, preferred book buying place, or at the Penguin Random House site.

Today's episode discusses the accuracy paradox. There are cases when one might prefer a less accurate model because it yields more predictive power or better captures the underlying causal factors describing the outcome variable you are interested in. This is especially relevant in machine learning when trying to predict rare events. We discuss how the accuracy paradox might apply if you were trying to predict the likelihood a person was a bird owner.