Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id611505133
Creating averages out of the information, he then developed general theories about humanity, treating these averages “as if they were real quantities out there,”
id611506448
So long as we remember that such measures are abstractions, they can be useful. But as Wiggins and Jones point out, the Queteletian fantasy that the map is the territory has proved remarkably persistent throughout the history of data.
✏️ The issue with data from the start.. Treating abstractions as real and actual. 🔗 View Highlight
id611508206
crime rates are a set of numbers about the recorded incidence of activities considered worthy of policing. Yet a number of assumptions have already worked their way into the data at the moment of its making: what gets recorded, who does the policing and who gets policed, and, perhaps most important, what is considered a crime. Even in the aggregate, these numbers do not represent reality in its fullness, but they nonetheless take on a life of their own. By shaping politicians’ perceptions of a city or neighborhood or group of people, and by training the algorithmic policing software that predicts who will commit a crime and where crimes will be committed, they create new realities on the ground: Particular neighborhoods are saturated with cops, and particular groups are turned into targets of policing. More and more criminals are the result.
✏️ Example of how abstractions become reality and injustice through public policies 🔗 View Highlight
id611509380
Galton was a eugenicist—in fact, he coined the term—and believed that data analysis would provide a scientific basis for racial hierarchy. Along the way, he developed methods like correlation and regression that remain foundational to the practice of statistics.
id611509578
statisticians helped make policy, and those policies created a set of self-fulfilling prophecies.
id611515413
In 1974, Senator Sam Ervin, who had served as chair of the Senate Watergate Committee, introduced a bill that “aimed to establish control of personal data as a right of every American citizen,” Wiggins and Jones write. Crucially, the bill’s provisions covered both government and corporate databases, and the discussions in Congress weren’t just about privacy but also justice—that is, about “the potential harms of automatic decision making and the likely disproportionate impact upon less empowered groups.”
id611516110
Ervin’s 1974 bill garnered bipartisan support, but business hated it. Wiggins and Jones quote a scaremongering statement from one credit card company: “If the free flow of information is impeded by law, the resulting inefficiencies will necessarily be translated into higher costs to industry and consumer.” Under pressure, Congress shrank the scope of the proposed bill. The version that passed, the Privacy Act of 1974, applied only to the federal government
✏️ Corporations overruling government, hurting people. This happens a lot and needs to be collated xref followup 🔗 View Highlight
id611517342
Following this failure to protect nongovernmental data, the free use and abuse of personal data came to seem a natural state of affairs—not something contingent, not something subject to change, not something subject to our political process and choices,”
id611519636
racists like Galton contributed so centrally to the development of statistical methods that are now embedded in automated systems that perpetuate racial hierarchies in various ways.