215: Gathering Data in Machine Learning with Abeba Birhane

About this Episode

01:41 - Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’

• Abeba Birhane on a person is a person through other persons
• Cartesian Thinking
• Individualism

13:59 - Predicting How People Behave and Act via Machine Learning is Ethically Flawed

• “Measuring” People
• Simon’s Ant
• Abstraction
  • Greater Than Code Episode 038: Category Theory for Normal Humans with Dr. Eugenia Cheng
  • Order Out of Chaos by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers
• Collecting Data
• Confirmation Bias

34:21 - Examining Machine Learning Models and Data

• Means Testing
• Generalized Empathy

“When you get rid of what you don’t want, you do not necessarily get what you do want and you may get something you want a lot less. It is that simple…..anyone that ever watches television knows that!” – Russell L. Ackoff

• “Scoring” People Perpetuates Stereotypes
• Acurracy Confirms Bias

50:09 - Important Ideosyncracies and Contaminating Factors

• Seeing and appreciating the potential to be different in every person in every situation.
• The ability to tease apart existing cultural ideas around identity and humanity.
• Taking concepts from different but related fields and seeing their connectedness and bringing them together into a whole that is more than the sum of their parts.
• Seeing consequences that don’t belong to any one cause.

Reflections:

Mando: Cartesian thinking and worldview is embedded in us.

Avdi: “Contaminating factors.”

“Dive into yourself to find yourself.”

Rein: Jainism has gotten this right for centuries.

• The Elephant and the Blindfolded Men Parable
• The Theory of Conditioned Predication or Contigency
• The Theory of Partial Standpoints

Jessica: Giving the Cartesian program credit for what it’s good for: using science as a way to break things down into parts and studying them deeply; we’ve learned a lot.

Abeba: It’s not all bad. BUT, we forget to put the pieces back together and acknowledge reality.

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