The Eye Test
A Case for Human Creativity in the Age of Analytics
Chris Jones
Having read it
★★★★☆
A thoroughly decent viewpoint that is well observed through its chapters, offering solid and grounded perspectives, opinions and evidence on why more human involvement in many of our society’s outputs is a good thing.
Endless measurement of (digital) data and the need to label and categorise it all (oft desperately) through a kind of productivity and efficiency lens led by algorithms (and no doubt something like ‘business success’!) won’t save us, or necessarily make things easier and/or simpler; everything won’t be solved if you just take this product, use this service, pop this pill etc. etc.
Life is chaotic and complex and well worth going with its flow and adapting and learning from its past into its future.
A good passage
The way entertainment algorithms are sometimes fallible, the dependence
on math in other fields can lead us down paths that are later proved incorrect, and we need to be mindful of those limitations. We also need to see the opportunity and know how to respond when the answer can’t be a number. That doesn’t seem like an outlandish proposition to me, but suggest that the analytics movement has sometimes threatened overcorrection, and you risk becoming a victim of the same Us versus Them mentality that plagues our society as a whole. You’re either for data, fully and completely, or you’re for fairy dust. What an unhelpful way of thinking. Smart zealotry is still zealotry.
A second good passage
Proponents defend the use of algorithms in criminal justice the way automation is always defended: It’s cheaper, more efficient, and less prone to bias or human lapses in judgement. If you find it alarming that a machine will determine your prison sentence, feel free to put your fate in the hands of a judge who might be having a bad day.
[...]
Mathematical models, by their nature, sacrifice individual fairness in favour of collective efficiency, and when someone gets caught on the wrong side of the equation, corrections are hard to make.
A third good passage
I understand the attraction of extremes. They offer clarity, however illusionary and dangerous that conviction might prove. It can be hard to accept how much of our lives are accidents. A world of chaos is an uncomfortable cathedral in which to sit, and it’s appealing to imagine we have more control over the future than we do. But life on Earth doesn’t run like a clock. If it did, its surface wouldn’t be swept by hurricanes. The ground wouldn’t occasionally move beneath our feet. And vet some people who admonish the more magical thinkers among us for being irrational also somehow believe that we’re capable of having nearly perfect control of our fates, so long as we’re smart enough to do the math. What? That’s nuts. Besides being illogical – a different version of the sin of being human – it presumes the rest of us should want to be robots, as though we should aspire to be a what instead of a who. Kenneth Feinberg is right: ‘We are not assembly lines of math.’ If human beings are, by our nature, irrational, then it’s far more rational to think of ourselves as acting reliably human rather than unfortunately human. Our peccadillos are not mistakes. They are a function of who we are, and the world in which we live. Even Dr. Danny Kahneman understood the limits of his own prescriptions: ‘No one has ever made a decision because of a number,’ he said. ‘They need a story’.