
Historicizing the Self-Evident: An Interview with Lorraine Daston - benbreen
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/historicizing-the-self-evident-an-interview-with-lorraine-daston/
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datastoat
Great article! She mentions that probability and law are intertwined, in
particular in two aspects: degrees of proof, and aleatory contracts. It's also
been suggested that the originators of probability were either lawyers or sons
of lawyers [1].

There's another link that I've found fascinating: the philosophy of law put
forwards by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr (Supreme Court justice 1902-1932), and
the philosophy of modern machine learning. Holmes gave a famous talk in 1897,
"The Path of the Law", in which he said that law is nothing more than
prediction. Throughout his life he thought and wrote about the relationship
between predictions (by lawyers, by their clients, and by judges anticipating
review by other judges), rationales (as written out in a judge's decision),
and "scientific-style" explanations (the general legal principles that emerge
over time). He writes about how the law learns to draw separating lines
between clusters of cases, in language that might have come from a modern
textbook on k-nearest-neighbours.

Reading about Holmes [2], and reading about modern takes on explanation and
prediction in machine learning [3], I think there are some striking parallels
-- and I wonder if Holmes's ideas might lead to new ways of thinking about
explainability in machine learning.

[1]
[https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019...](https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199607617.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199607617-e-3)

[2] [https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/oliver-wendell-holmes-jr-legal-
theo...](https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/oliver-wendell-holmes-jr-legal-theory-and-
judicial-restraint/)

[3]
[https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1294167961](https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.ss/1294167961)

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bacr
Great timing: I just finished “Objectivity” the book she co-authored with
Peter Gallison. It is a phenomenal work on the history of science, looking at
the development of the concept of Objectivity throughout the enlightenment
through the lens of scientific atlases. Her writing is beautiful, concrete and
lucid. Highly recommended to any Hacker News readers.

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zackmorris
_At that time, most heavy-duty calculation took place either in government
administration or in astronomical observations. In both of these sites, a
great deal of calculation had to be done by hand. Already in the 18th century
at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, forms had been developed that divided
the task of a complex calculation into small enough steps — so that, at least
at the lower end, the Observatory could employ very cheap schoolboy labor in
order to complete them economically.

Over the course of the 19th century, schoolboys were increasingly replaced by
women as the cheapest and most reliable form of labor. We can read interesting
correspondences from astronomers at Oxford and Harvard recruiting the first
generation of women college graduates to perform calculations for half the
wages of men. By the late 19th century, the Bureau of Calculation at the Paris
Observatory was entirely feminized._

This is a trend that I've noticed in the ~30 years I've been doing this. As
computer programming gets more advanced, with greater separation of concerns
and finer granularity of tasks, it's becoming more marginalized. My feeling is
that programming will no longer be viewed as a lucrative career within the
next 10 years, and that it will be largely replaced with algorithms generated
by machine learning within 20 years.

I included the quote about calculation being largely done by women before it
was automated because we're seeing this happening today in developing
countries. They'll catch up to the developed world between 10 and 20 years
from now, just in time to also be automated by AI.

I find this all tragic to some degree, because my fondest dream of making
computer science available to everyone will also eventually lead to its
undoing. This is simply not the future that I anticipated growing up. We're
going to end up in a world of ultimate competition and wealth inequality
instead of automating the means of production so that everyone can enjoy the
prosperity of their basic needs being met with something like UBI. So far the
evidence for that is overwhelming, and I'm only seeing the smallest pockets of
resistance. So I don't have high hopes for the future anymore.

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neonate
[https://archive.md/3F0Hl](https://archive.md/3F0Hl)

