
What does social science have to offer the data industry? - schaunwheeler
https://towardsdatascience.com/what-does-social-science-have-to-offer-the-data-industry-b026211a61ca
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eksemplar
I think there is an important lesson in the approach to science that we see in
the social sciences. Coming from a technical background we approach science,
and data, as being the fundamental way of discover truth, but with humans
there are often more than one truth.

We’ve seen the effect of it in management over the past 25 years. Today a good
manager is expected to approach a team, not by instructing them in what to do
and when to do it, but rather by creating a shared meaning through group
conversation. It’s more important when you manage people who produce by
thinking and being creative, but even at the factory line, this softer
approach is proving useful.

We haven’t yet applied this to big data. I’m often sold ML as the ability to
predict the future, and to some extend that is true. If I look at all the
alcoholic families in my municipality and compare their case history with big
data gathered on a national level, I’ll certainly be able to predict how many
of their children we’ll need to remove. I just can’t predict which ones
because determinism doesn’t actually work on something that complex.

The more data we have the less we understand about causality, something I’ve
learned from history. If you look at the Roman Empire without digging into it,
chosing Christianity seem obvious, but if you really get all the data on their
options and then try to figure out why they did like they did, you’ll have no
clue. Another example is online advertising, I read a news paper that I’ve
never seen a single add for, and I see a lot of adds for news papers. I’m
often called by news paper salesmen as well, but not for the one I read. This
is because it doesn’t suit my elaborate online profile. My profile tells the
add agencies what I should read, but it doesn’t tell them why, and the
difference is failing them.

If we really want ML and big data to be truely useful, I think we need to
learn from the social sciences, because they work much more with the
complicated science behind the why.

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zaphar
Except that they still can't do what the author needs in order to do her work.
A tool she can use. Social Sciences have not yet produced anything that can
effectively produce a change or even adequately describe a social system.

Her tagline is appropriate. She'll gladly use a tool that works, but she won't
use one on faith.

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eksemplar
You're right, but I think my point is that data science hasn't really done
anything useful in fields involving humans.

Don't get me wrong, we do a lot of data science in the public sector these
years, but we also measure it's efficiency and capability and compare it to
the past 100 years of us doing the same thing without AI, and things haven't
improved. At least not yet.

Mean while, the social sciences have given us tool that help us inflict actual
lasting change on groups of people simply by using language in a specific way
or working toward a shared consensus.

So maybe the question shouldn't be what social sciences have to offer AI
research, but rather, what data science has to offer social fields.

I'm well aware that data science has it's value in other fields. We use it to
troll through massive amounts case files and save thousands of man-hours in
the process, but why would you want to use social science for that?

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nonbel
>"data science hasn't really done anything useful in fields involving humans."

So you think data science has not been useful to google, amazon, facebook,
etc?

Basically you are proposing that (at least) hundreds of billions of dollars
have been spent with no return so far. It is possible but is there evidence
for this?

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empath75
I think having a background in sociology, psychology, would be extremely good
for ai researchers and anybody who needs to work with machine learning in
general because ultimately those systems will have to interact with people,
and a lot of those algorithms will have a huge impact on people’s lives, and
you need to be sure that you aren’t encoding biases, etc that are going to
harm people or unfairly exclude them.

~~~
corporateslaver
In some ways couldn’t that be considered social engineering through ai? If the
training set shows bias and this so does the algorithm, it’s a reflection of
reality. Manually changing the algorithm to influence society on a grand scale
is dystopian. It’s a dangerous path that sounds humanitarian but is really
authoritarian.

~~~
seandougall
The problem is that algorithms tend to amplify bias, rather than just reflect
it. We’re constantly being told (implicitly or explicitly) that we should
trust ML because computers are objective, but that ignores many of the most
important variables in the training set.

Google’s Deep Dream is a great way to visualize this. Given a source image
that you repeatedly feed through an algorithm that attempts to parse and
recreate the image, an unbiased algorithm would produce something similar to
the original. Instead you get dogfishbirds and eyes everywhere — that’s the
bias of the training set getting amplified.

~~~
thraway180306
DeepDream is an apt example on a deeper level of analogy. What they wanted was
an advance in the important topic of interpretability/explainability. Offshot
of a failed experiment turned into the subfield of style transfer and pretty
pictures. That became a success of AI somehow, one to talk about and dazzle
audience with.

About the OP ignorance, well, statistics started off as a social science, so
maybe self professed data scientists while looking into social sciences,
ethics and psychology, could also look about history.

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michaelchisari
Ask not what social science can offer the data industry, ask what the data
industry can offer social science.

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rossdavidh
Ouch.

I think one way to think of this is, does a given field have any tools that,
even if you disagreed with their values, you would still want access to?
People who don't like the idea of natural selection, still want doctors to
take into account the phenomenon of antibiotic-resistant infections in their
treatment. People who dislike the values of the software industry, often still
want access to computers to publish their essays, surf the internet, etc.
People who dislike the analytic, anti-holistic orientation of the physical
sciences, still want access to the technology made using that.

What is there in the social sciences that you would want access to, even if
you did not share their values? I think we may live to see a day when there is
something, but I'm not sure that right now there is (yet).

~~~
xapata
You don't like cost-benefit analysis? Or city planning?

I suspect some topics which you might think are just "common sense" come from
intensive research.

~~~
rossdavidh
I could believe that intensive research can be useful, but from the cases I
have seen of cost-benefit analysis or city planning actually being used, no I
don't like those. Cost-benefit analysis (as actually used by business) seems
to leave out any strategic advantage that cannot be quantified, and city
planning (as actually practiced by cities) seems to be responsible for a lot
of what went wrong in the last half of the 20th century in America's cities.

Of course, it could well be that the tools of social scientists were being
mishandled by amatuers; I could pretty easily believe that. But as examples,
those two both look to me to be net negatives.

~~~
xapata
> leave out any strategic advantage that cannot be quantified

Everything can be quantified, no matter how intangible. Perhaps you're not
familiar with the research.

> city planning (as actually practiced by cities)

On the whole, city governments ignore city planning researchers.

What's your academic background? If you've never studied social sciences, you
may not be aware of what the scientists are saying.

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amelius
Since the data industry is using repeated real-life experiments on humans,
can't we say that the data industry IS social science (or part of it)?

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AndrewKemendo
I'd go further to say that the data science community is doing social science
better than the SocSci community in this regard.

The problem here is that because data science is industrially driven, there is
no separation between measurement and influence. So, whereas academic sciences
try not to influence behavior, but rather understand it, data science is
trying to influence user behavior with understanding and ethics as an
afterthought.

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jwildeboer
What does data science has to offer to society? Currently not much either.
#sarcasm

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paultopia
I think the author forgets that there are quantitative as well as qualitative
social sciences. An anthropologist like the author might think that
ethnography doesn't have much to offer (though that seems dubious to me too,
I'm no expert). But what about econometrics, item response theory work from
psych, field experiments and "natural experiments" work from political
science, network analysis work from sociology. Social science methodologists
have contributed to a lot of the same things industry data scientists work on.

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AndrewKemendo
The field of Economics, especially behavioral economics, is probably trying
the hardest to develop means of measurement for social phenomena.

At the end of the day though if you want to do data, then you have to have
something which you can measure. So far social sciences have not been able to
agree on a consistent observable metric for comparison.

Until we can figure out something measurable from first principals then social
phenomena will be measured by proxy. Observational data about how people act
is the closest we can come today to trying to determine why people act.

