I Am

Just be glad you’re not getting all the government you’re paying for.
—   Will Rogers
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On This Day In:
2015	Positively Aiming Higher
2014	Suspicious Minds
2013	We Are Not Alone
2012	Lawyer, n.
2011	Each Day Remember…
2010	Impossible Dreams of Camelot

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It Ain’t Easy

A republic is not an easy form of government to live under, and when the responsibility of citizenship is evaded, democracy decays and authoritarianism takes over.
—    Earl Warren
Former Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and Former Governor of California
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On This Day In:
2015	A Series Of Funerals
2014	And Your Point Is?
2013	Infinitely Care
2012	In My Room
(Leap Year 29th)	Stingray – TV Series Review (This is my most popular post since starting my blog – hands down! It still draws hits almost every week. The hits seem to come mostly from Central Europe. I guess the show must be in syndication there.)
(Leap Year 29th)	A Single Thread
2011	Lyrical Mixture
	Teaching = Translating

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Campbell’s Law

Once it was clear that the NSA could do something, it seemed inarguable that the agency should do it — even after the bounds of information overload (billions of records added to bulging databases every day) or basic decency (spying on allied heads of state, for example) had long since been surpassed.  The value of every marginal gigabyte of high tech signals intelligence was, at least in theory, quantifiable.  The downside—the inability to prioritize essential intelligence and act on it; the damage to America’s democratic legitimacy — was not.  As a result, during the past couple of decades spycraft went from being a pursuit driven by human judgment calls to one driven by technical capability.
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The reason the quants win is that they’re almost always right — at least at first.  They find numerical patterns or invent ingenious algorithms that increase profits or solve problems in ways that no amount of subjective experience can match.  But what happens after the quants win is not always the data-driven paradise that they and their boosters expected.  The more a field is run by a system, the more that system creates incentives for everyone (employees, customers, competitors) to change their behavior in perverse ways — providing more of whatever the system is designed to measure and produce, whether that actually creates any value or not.  It’s a problem that can’t be solved until the quants learn a little bit from the old-fashioned ways of thinking they’ve displaced.
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Sociologist Donald T. Campbell noted this dynamic back in the ’70s, when he articulated what’s come to be known as Campbell’s law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,” he wrote, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
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That’s what a good synthesis of big data and human intuition tends to look like.  As long as the humans are in control, and understand what it is they’re controlling, we’re fine.  It’s when they become slaves to the numbers that trouble breaks out.  So let’s celebrate the value of disruption by data  —  but let’s not forget that data isn’t everything.
—  Felix Salmon
From his article: “Why Quants Don’t Know Everything“
Which appeared in the January 2014 issue of “Wired Magazine“
[Emphasis in the quote is mine.  —   KMAB]
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On This Day In:
2014	Dignified Values
2013	Unappreciated Skill
2012	Living Courage
2011	What’s Happening To Us?
2010	Toothbrush, Carbon and Monoxide
	Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

 

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Wolves At The Door

A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.
—   Bertrand de Jouvenel
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