mathbabe

I grew up in the Breakfast Club era, which is to say a time when every teenager had a soundtrack to their lives, depending on where they fit in the social strata of their particular high school.

We would make mixed tapes, and listen to them on constant loop on our walkmans, until they were scratchy and worn, and we would take odd jobs to pay for the monumental AA battery use. A sure sign of long-lasting and meaningful friendship would be if one teenager made a mixed tape and gave it to another teenager. That would be a deep sign, both of kinship and, of course, of musical identity.

Personally, I was a misfit. That doesn’t mean that I didn’t belong in any clique, it means, ironically, that I fit in with “the misfits,” which were their own group, proud of not getting along with any other groups, except at times we’d forge alliances with the druggies. For example, when I first got to Lexington High School – my freshman year was 1986 – there was a smoking section outside the principal’s office where the misfits and the druggies could all smoke whatever we wanted, for some reason there were really no rules, and it was a happy time. By the time I left, though, the smokers were forced very slightly off campus, which is to say about a block away on Park Drive, and the temporary misfit/druggie alliance was forever broken. We misfits retreated to the J-House lounge.

I lived on Waltham Street, and my old house is on this map.

Anyhoo, I’m getting away from myself, because I meant to talk about soundtracks, but I instead got carried away with nostalgic memories of hanging out – for a brief time – with the cool, fucked up kids.

My soundtrack was simple: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Jethro Tull. I wore an army jacket and was deeply misunderstood, and sometimes in the summer I’d tie dye shirts and refuse to participate in things. This is me refusing to participate in the junior prom:

Isn’t my friend Karen looking gorgeous?!

Here’s why this all came up today. If I could go back in time and live high school all over again, which I tend to do without permission anyway, I’d listen nonstop to Neutral Milk Hotel’s album, In the Aeroplane Over The Sea, even though it was release in 1998 and I graduated in 1990. Hey, it’s a fantasy, and they don’t always make sense.

I dare you to tell me you don’t agree when you hear the title track (or else you already know it, in which case you already agree):

Make sure you listen to the bridge, which is the best part of any song, ever.

Today I want to share with you all two recent blog posts from nerdy young women. And who doesn’t love nerdy young women!?

The first is by Michelle G, an M.I.T. student, class of 2018, who is majoring in “14,” which is M.I.T. code for economics. She wrote a blogpost called Picture yourself as a stereotypical male, about the question of intelligence, gender, and stereotype threat. I thought I knew all about that stuff but I learned quite a bit from her post. p.s. Larry Summers, I hope you read this.

The second is by Meena Boppana, a Harvard CS major/math minor who has guest blogged here on mathbabe before. This post is called The Making of A Girl Mathlete, and it describes her experience winning math competitions, often as the only girl. Even though I personally think math contests kind of suck, I appreciate how much Meena got out of them.

Speaking of the Harvard math department, I’ll be there next Monday, on a panel with Moon Duchin talking about gender inclusivity in mathematics. It’s the first of a series. Here’s the Facebook page of the event.

Yesterday I wrote a post complaining that I didn’t know how to find an awesome job. The thing is, most advertised data science jobs either make rich people richer (finance) or make poor people poorer (ad tech) [1]

Well, I asked for advice, and you guys seriously delivered. I am so very lucky to have such amazing commenters and friends, and as a small token of my gratitude I want to compile some of the advice I got.

1. A lot of you encouraged me to try to first figure out what I want to do and then convince a company doing that to give me a job. Great idea! Someone even sent me articles with useful advice on how to do that, here and here.
2. Someone suggest I look for independent contract work by searching this list. Great idea.
3. I got a few people writing to me to encourage me to consider teaming up with the Data Science for Social Good crowd. Maybe I should start a New York chapter?
4. Someone had a friend who made a huge list her favorite toys and then wrote to the companies that made them telling them she’d be great as an employee, and it totally worked. “Toys” can be taken to be a general term, of course.
5. Someone encouraged me to consider the environment and the team I’d be working with rather than the job I’d be doing. Trouble is I tried that, it didn’t work. But it might work for someone else.
6. A bunch of people mentioned working for non-profits as data people. Non-profits have their challenges to work with but they seem to need the help. Hopefully I’ll have a guest post soon on this issue.
7. Many people wrote to me with ideas for specific jobs I should apply for. I will, thanks!
8. Also, a few people just wrote saying I’d be fine and they had hope for me. Those were really nice emails.
9. Finally, quite a few other data scientists wrote saying they, too, want to make the world a better place and are frustrated by the lack of obvious chances to do this. Obviously I’m not alone.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for their advice and encouragement. I’ll keep you updated.

1. In fact I consider it my go-to example of how “the market” fails, if you think the market is supposed to offer profitable opportunities to do stuff that is worthwhile and/or important for society. It’s kind of the opposite, but maybe – hopefully – I’m defining the market too narrowly, i.e. by searching for data science jobs on LinkedIn.

You may have noticed the long-standing tagline on my About page:

What can a non-academic mathematician do that makes the world a better place?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately. I’m looking for a job nowadays since my book project is wrapping up and I have no source of income. So far my attempts at sorting through the LinkedIn “data science” jobs are leading to a huge list of finance and online advertising jobs (which I don’t apply to), and a few others which are somewhat more interesting thrown in the mix. But they typically have more than 100 people each applying to them.

Which is to say, I’ve applied to a bunch of jobs I only kind of want and haven’t heard back from almost any of them. It’s kind of depressing. Actually it’s super depressing.

So I’ve come up with another way of thinking about searching. Why don’t I start with organizations that I think are doing cool things and offer them my data science expertise? In a consulting role primarily, but also longer-term if they are interested.

I know there are places where you can sign up to be an “expert witness,” so I’m looking for something similar: an expert consultant. There must already be ways to do this, but I don’t know how. Obviously one way would be to try to get a job at IBM, but then I’d be back to working for clients in finance.

Advice would be deeply appreciated. You can comment here or send me email at the address on my About page.

When you’re writing a book for the general public’s consumption, you have to keep things pretty simple. You can’t spend a lot of time theorizing about why some stuff is going on, you have to focus on what’s happening, and how bad it is, and who’s getting screwed. Anything beyond that and you’ll be called a conspiracy theorist by some level of your editing team.

But the good thing about writing a blog is that you can actually say anything you like. That’s one reason I cling so strongly to mathbabe; I need to be able to write stuff that’s mildly conspiracy-theoretical. After all, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean nobody’s out to get you, right?

Anyhoo, I’m going to throw out a theory about big data, disparate impact, and the neoliberal mindset. First I need to set it up a bit.

Did you hear about this recent story whereby Facebook just got a patent to measure someone’s creditworthiness by looking at who their friends are and what their credit scores are? They idea is, you are more likely to be able to pay back your loans if the people you’re friends with pay back their loans.

On the one hand, it sounds possibly true: richer people tend to have richer friends, and so if there’s not very much information about someone, but that person is nevertheless inferred to be “friends with rich people,” then they might be a better bet for paying back loans.

On the other hand, it also sounds like an unfair way to distribute loans: most of us are friends with a bunch of people from high school, and if I happened to go to a high school filled with poor kids, then loans for me would be ruled out by this method.

This leads to the concept of disparate impact, which was beautifully explained in this recent article called When Big Data Becomes Bad Data (hat tip Marc Sobel). The idea is, when your process (or algorithm) favors one group of people over another, intentionally or not, it might be considered unfair and thus illegal. There’s lots of precedent for this in the courts, and recently the Supreme Court upheld it as a legitimate argument in Fair Housing Act cases.

It’s still not clear whether a “disparate impact” argument can be used in the case of algorithms, though. And there are plenty of people who work in the field of big data who dismiss this possibility altogether, and who even claim that things like the Facebook idea above are entirely legitimate. I had an argument on my Slate Money podcast last Friday about this very question.

Here’s my theory as to why it’s so hard for people to understand. They have been taken over in these matters by a neoliberal thought process, whereby every person is told to behave rationally, as an individual, and to seek maximum profit. It’s like an invisible hand on a miniature scale, acting everywhere and at all times.

Since this ideology has us acting as individuals, and ignoring group dynamics, the disparate impact argument is difficult if not impossible to understand. Why would anyone want to loan money to a poor person? That wouldn’t make economic sense. Or, more relevantly, why would anyone not distinguish between a poor person and a rich person before making a loan? That’s the absolute heart of how the big data movement operates. Changing that would be like throwing away money.

Since every interaction boils down to game theory and strategies for winning, “fairness” doesn’t come into the equation (note, the more equations the better!) of an individual’s striving for more opportunity and more money. Fairness isn’t even definable unless you give context, and context is exactly what this mindset ignores.

Here’s how I talk to someone when this subject comes up. I right away distinguish between the goal of the loaner – namely, accuracy and profit – and the goal of the public at large, namely that we have a reasonable financial system that doesn’t exacerbate the current inequalities or send people into debt spirals. This second goal has a lot to do with fairness and definitely pertains broadly to groups of people. Then, after setting that up, we can go ahead and discuss the newest big data idea, as long as we remember to look at it through both lenses.

I’m very happy to announce that the wonderful high school students that we worked with over the summer at Occupy Summer School have decided to self-organize into an after-school program at their school, the UAI, starting this fall (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go check out our webpage or the press we got from the New Yorker written by Alex Carp).

A few of us from the Alt Banking group had a meeting with 5 of them earlier this week. Together they represent the organizing committee of their new activism group, which they named “Project Occupy.” Their plan is to hold weekly afternoon meetings, which will be topic-based, and for a given week they want material for their chosen topic in the form of a short video or an article. One of the topics they already chose for one of the first meetings is “cultural appropriation.” They then named a bunch of examples of cultural appropriation of black culture. I’m planning to send them this for reading material.

They are, as always, very sharp and observant. Teenagers are the best.

I am super proud of them and I can’t wait to see what they do. I told them how much they’ve taught us about keeping protests fun and generous, and giving away gifts of food or balloons (actually, both) to make their point well-received.

They want to eventually plan events around the topics they’ve learned about and gotten passionate about, and possibly also create podcasts or YouTube video series. Oh, and they want food at all their meetings. Gotta keep things fun.

We all know about the achievement gap, whereby poor kids don’t do as well on standardized tests as rich kids. It’s big and it’s growing. Logically speaking, we might try to solve it – to close the achievement gap – by lowering inequality. But that’s a hard thing to do, politically. It would require things like higher taxes and better minimum wages and stronger safety nets.

So instead, politicians everywhere have decided to simply assign blame to the school teachers who the last people to be seen with poor kids before they take the standardized tests.

If you watched the Republican debate, you might have seen Chris Christie emphatically suggest that the teachers’ union should be punched in the face. He’s willing to repeat that:

Speaking of getting rid of teacher unions, that’s exactly what they did in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, 10 years ago. And the results are mixed:

I googled for “new orleans charter school performance”

In Washington D.C., they hired School Chancellor Michelle Rhee to fix their ailing schools, so she came in and fired a bunch of teachers with bad scores, and then gave bonuses to a bunch of teachers and schools with good ones, and then ignored the ensuing cheating scandal. After she left scores largely went back to normal. The achievement gap is wider than it was before Rhee:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/12/d-c-school-systems-gaping-achievement-gaps-in-seven-graphs/

None of this particularly surprises me because, again, it’s likely not a teacher-specific problem, but rather an economic problem, and residents of New Orleans are still poor.

It’s a correlation versus causation problem, actually. We know poor kids do badly on tests compared to rich kids, and we look for something we can control that would change that story. Originally we focused on more tests, thinking that shining a light on the problem would automatically solve it. That didn’t work, so we turned our focus to teachers, again mostly as an easily available knob to turn. It’s taking a few years for the data to come out that this new method also isn’t addressing the problem.

There’s a new idea afloat on how to close the achievement gap, by way of Florida (h/t Jordan Ellenberg). Namely, to give bonuses to teachers that themselves got good SAT scores. A few details:

1. The bonus is $10,000
2. The cut-off is 80th percentile of SAT scores
3. Teachers are eligible even if they took the test 30 years ago
4. The teachers also need to be rated “highly effective” to earn their bonus
5. Except if they are first year teachers, in which case they don’t have a rating yet, so just their high SAT scores will do

It’s probably unnecessary to mention exactly how ridiculous this is, but I do want to point that teachers have no motivation whatsoever under this new scheme. They either qualify or they don’t. Not sure what it’s supposed to achieve in terms of carrots or sticks. It’s the equivalent of giving tall men extra money to buy suits.

I’m waiting for the meta-analysis that shows the achievement gap doesn’t respond to firing bad teachers, or charter schools, or even more testing, or any other easy target.

So what should we be doing? I have two suggestions, and neither of them is politically easy.

First, if we really wanted to see progress, we should stop persecuting teachers and immediately normalize the funding of school systems so poor kids have equal or more resources than rich kids. That would have some effects – at least poor districts could afford the latest books, for example.

Second, even that kind of progress would take us only so far. As long as a deep inequality of opportunities exists, and mobility is low, we can expect a lack of investment in poor people. We need to address these issues on the societal level.

I watch my share of bad commercials on TV. I don’t have cable but I have an antenna so I can receive some free TV stations, including one that is clearly meant for senior citizens called CoziTV. Cozi regularly has marathons of Murder She Wrote, Magnum P.I., Hart to Hart, and Fantasy Island, all shows that I somehow can’t stop watching, partly I think because I get so much confirmation from them about how awful my childhood was.

Anyhoo, back to the commercials. I couldn’t help notice a proliferation of ads for help with a medical condition called “transvaginal mesh injury.” Basically the ads were asking whether the viewer had such a problem, and whether they’d like to perhaps talk to a lawyer at this free phone number. Pretty much every other ad was about this condition, so it seemed like a pretty big deal, at least for the intended audience of old ladies.

Well, I didn’t pay much attention to it, until I came across this fascinating Reuters special report on corrupt medical lending practices entitled New breed of investor profits by financing surgeries for desperate women patients and written by Alison Frankel and Jessica Dye.

The article outlines the following scheme: financiers find women who need this surgery, based on a defective medical part, but don’t have the money for it and whose insurance companies won’t immediately cover it. They offer them the financing now in return for part of the eventual settlement with the company that was responsible for the faulty mesh. But then they make a deal with a surgeon to overcharge for the surgery, and they inflate the costs as well, and at the end of the whole thing they take a large part of the settlement which the woman was entitled to, and sometimes the woman even ends up owing them money.

It’s horrible, but it’s really just one example of a large industry of what is known as litigation finance, which just means the world where people with lots of money decide to bet on outcomes of court cases.

A recent Bloomberg article discussed the growing industry of litigation finance, and describes how congresspeople are starting to pay attention to all the hedge funds getting in on the act.

Of course, the financiers defend this practice by pointing out that, with money from people like them, a given side in a legal proceeding has more resources to make their case. They would also point out that they only put money behind cases that have at least some chance of winning.

However, there are two big problems with it as a concept. First, it means that there will be more money available to lawsuits in general. We’ve already seen what happened with college tuition when something that’s already too expensive gets access to loans: it gets even more expensive. It’s an arms race. According to Bloomberg, the typical client for these litigation finance firms are big companies which use corporate law firms.

Second, the justice system is already super unfair, and it’s not like hedge funds are running into this game to improve the system. Rather, they are there to exploit the system. That’s what hedge funds do. So if they have detected a bias in the system, they are going to treat it like an arbitrage situation and throw money at it for all they’re worth. The side effects of that will have nothing to do with justice.

The real reforms we need to see with the justice system is a way for money to be less of a factor, not more.

Whose fault is it when a woman gets sexually assaulted? For most people I interact with, the answer seems obvious: the assailant is at fault. Otherwise we’re blaming the victim.

In spite of that commonsense logic, though, there seems to be a sustained argument on the other side of the debate, and not only from right-wing talk radio. For example, over on the Guardian there’s quite a discussion about how The Pretenders star Chrissie Hynde blames herself for previous sexual assault, with the following excerpt pretty much summing up her position:

She said: “Technically speaking, however you want to look at it, this was all my doing and I take full responsibility. You can’t f*** about with people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’ badges … those motorcycle gangs, that’s what they do.

“You can’t paint yourself into a corner and then say whose brush is this? You have to take responsibility. I mean, I was naive.”

In Bangladesh, we similarly see arguments for why people marry their daughters off young which rely on the inevitability of sexual violence:

“I photographed the wedding of Akhi’s 13-year-old sister last year, and when I asked her mother why she was marrying her daughter off, she described not feeling comfortable to let her walk to the corner store because she would be harassed by men and boys,” Joyce said. “She also said no boy wants to marry a girl older than 18. If a girl is still single past that age people will ask too many questions. She knew it was wrong to marry very early, but they weren’t from a wealthy family, and she told her daughter’s husband to wear condoms for a few years, so it will be OK. Marriage is seen as a cover of respect and protection for women. By not going to school, it reduces the risk of being sexually active outside the house or be harassed while commuting.”

Don’t get me wrong, I think sexual violence is outrageous and wrong. The last thing I’d want to do is to suggest acquiescence in the face of it. I don’t want to blame victims or make things worse for them in any way. But we hear arguments like the above from reasonable, thoughtful people, who have plenty to lose by being wrong. They’re coming from personal experience which we should listen to. We should, in addition, examine why the “logical” argument doesn’t seem to work with them.

I have a theory. It’s about what our cultural expectations about men are. I’ll divide it into cases.

1. Men can more or less control violent urges and are not inherently sexual predators. In this worldview, women of all ages should be free to wear whatever we want and go wherever we want and expect only consensual sexual interactions. This is an ideal world, which one might call civilized. Mind you I’m not even talking about being bombarded with idealized visions of sexualized femininity on billboards (but that would be nice too). I think I more or less live in this world and that means I’m lucky.
2. Men are divided into two groups: sexual predators and “others.” Just as it would be silly to ask a lion not to kill an antelope when it’s hungry, and similarly it would be ridiculous to think that (some) men wouldn’t rape a woman if they had the chance. That’s along the lines of the worldview of Chrissie Hynde. If you really think that there just simply are men out there who are uncontrolled and uncontrollable sexual predators, then of course it’s up to the individual to steer clear of them. And it doesn’t make her wrong and us right, it just means we have different expectations of what men are like.
3. No man can be trusted, they’re all trying to take advantage of women at all times, and harassment is to be expected. This does seem to be more or less the expectation in certain situations, like in the above quote from a mother in Bangladesh as well as all the communities torn apart by war and insecurity and desperate poverty. If someone faces this kind of reality, they have to work within it, even if it means marrying off their 13-year-old daughter before she’s ready or willing. It’s a bad choice versus a worse choice.

Today I’m celebrating some good news for working-class people in this country. Namely, the definition of “employee” is changing, making it easier for employees at McDonalds and other places to complain about poor treatment. The good news comes via a National Labor Relations Board ruling yesterday.

I wrote previously about the economics of McDonalds franchises, but it comes down to this: 90% of the low-level employees at McDonalds don’t technically work for McDonalds at all; instead, they work for a local franchise owner, who in turn rents stuff, including the McDonalds brand, from the parent corporation.

In spite of the technical and legal framework, the parent corporation controlled the burger flippers at a minute level, through surveillance, customer service policy, branding requirements, and most importantly through controlling the margins of the franchise owner.

The legal separation, which was solidly working until yesterday, meant that employees couldn’t complain about bad treatment of their employer, McDonalds, but rather had to complain only about the way the local franchise owner treated them. This prevented large-scale unionization attempts among other things. The new ruling means that the workers will have the right to negotiate with McDonalds corporation as a “joint employer.” Another way of saying this is that McDonalds will have much more liability when it concerns mistreatment of franchise workers.

An example of how this is good news is the following: it used to be true that if one McDonalds unionized, and demanded and received better wages, it would have little knock-on effects and indeed it would be quite difficult to pull off, given how tight the margins are for franchisees. Now, with the new ruling, a second McDonalds location could possibly use that one example as leverage in a bargaining agreement. Moreover, as a joint employer, McDonalds corp cannot shut down a franchise just for unionizing.

The ruling extends well beyond McDonalds. In fact the original case was a company that hired contractors to do its recycling. It will likely mean that it will in general be much harder for corporations to create legal distance between itself and the people hired to do work for that company, so contractors of all varieties, as long as the parent company has a substantial amount of control over the workers.

Power is the opposite of dependency. I learned this definition from Adam Reich when he came to talk to my Occupy Summer School students this summer about sociology and the OurWalmart struggle.

It’s useful and convincing: you have power over someone if they are dependent on you.

So it makes sense that systems of tipping gives us power as consumers. Waiters, or other service people, are dependent on us for tips, which are often a large part of their overall salaries, so we have power over them.

In fact, it gives us a kick, a real but short-lived kind of status in service situations. We get to temporarily play the part of the “little lord.” Some people exploit this role, demanding too much, asking for special favors, and enjoying having someone do our bidding. Others are over-sensitive to slights; if they feel like their status is being questioned at any level, they switch from little lords to little tyrants, demanding attention and extra work from their waiters. We’ve all seen this.

When you ask an American, we like our tipping systems, and we don’t want to give them up, even though it leads to all kinds of financial problems for restaurant workers. Partly this is because, as part of the power relationship, if the waitstaff or serviceperson wants to get a good tip from us, they have to be nice to us. They have to make us feel like they like us, and, a secondary requirement, that they like their job. Surly waiters are waiters who don’t depend on tips and who make us realize that being a waiter isn’t always such a great job. Not that this entire dynamic is obvious to us every time we enter into a tipper-tippee relationship, but it’s there, lurking.

So far nothing I’ve said is at all new. Tipping has been around for a while. But there is a new kind of service economy evolving, which I call “the gig economy,” but which tellingly has been described as “the sharing economy” by some.

So, if you hire an Uber or Lyft driver to drive you somewhere, the payment has become somewhat invisible, since it happens on your credit card via the app, and instead of tipping you rate your driver (although you can tip as well). in fact the “cashless and seamless” experience of being driven by an Uber driver is one of the selling points. “Hassle-free” is a commonly heard phrase around the gig economy.

But in terms of power dynamics, replacing tipping by rating doesn’t do much, since Uber drivers are entirely dependent on their overall rating to stay employed. And you might object because riders get rated as well, but let’s face it, the worst thing that could happen to a poorly rated rider is that he gets kicked off the app and has to use another rider app, but the worst thing that can happen to a driver with a bad rating is he could lose his job.

My fear is this: the invisibility of the transaction makes us as consumers even less aware of the power dynamics than we already are. We have gone from a transactional relationship, in a restaurant, to a inequitable faux-friendship. The marketing of the “sharing economy” doesn’t help:

Why is this a problem? Some of the most important lessons I teach my children is how to be grateful, polite, and non-tyrannical to people who are serving us, at a restaurant or wherever. It’s part of learning how to be an empathetic person, and a balancing out of one-on-one human interactions which I think is super important. I want them to know that service is not servitude, and that everyone is a person just trying to do their best. Of course, this goes for any kind of transactional service, not just the tipping kind.

However, the first step in extending gratitude to people who are extending us a service is to know when that transaction is occurring. If every bill is magically and invisibly settled, then my kids won’t even recognize that it existed, and instead of gratitude for help, they might just think the person they just interacted with really liked them. Another way for my kids to learn empathy is, of course, for them to have jobs in which they experience the other side of the transaction, and I hope they do have jobs like that, although it’s getting much harder to get such a job than it used to be.

Maybe I’m being an old fuddy-duddy here. After all, when I think about the future of work, I often come to the conclusion that sooner or later, once the robots are doing lots of the grunt work and hard labor, the rest of us will be more or less in service to each other. There will be teachers, and personal trainers, and personal assistants, and life coaches, and people who hang out with old people, and nannies, and so on. Every now and then society will support people who just think – although they too will provide service in the form of essays or research – or people who just have loads of cash and just entertain themselves all the time.

So, maybe it’s old-fashioned to want balance in each relationship; instead, we can enjoy the “friendly interactions” of servicing one person and then turning around and being serviced by someone else in another realm. Maybe someday I’ll be an Uber driver, smiling at my rider, then I’ll meet up with my personal trainer who is extremely nice to me. Maybe the seamlessness and cashlessness of each future transaction will free everyone up to talk about politics, and philosophy, and what have you, instead of haggling over the bill.

Or, and here’s my pessimistic side emerging, or maybe we’re watering down the appearance of power relationships because we have redefined the word “innovation” as “ways to make rich peoples lives easier” and we call something a “disruption” if a bunch of people’s job security is weakened and they need to rely on rating systems – and need to claim to like their job and their customers – in order to scrape by.

What do you think? What are the consequences of the gig economy on power dynamics between people?

There have been a lot of great articles recently on my beat, the dark side of big data. I wanted to share some of them with you today:

1. An interview with Cynthia Dwork by Clair Cain Miller (h/t Marc Sobel). Describes how fairness is not automatic in algorithms, and the somewhat surprising fact that, in order to make sure an algorithm isn’t racist, for example, you must actually take race into consideration when testing it.
2. How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election by Robert Epstein (h/t Ernie Davis). This describes the unreasonable power of search rank in terms political trust. Namely, when a given candidate was artificially lifted in terms of rank, people started to trust them more. Google’s meaningless response: “Providing relevant answers has been the cornerstone of Google’s approach to search from the very beginning. It would undermine the people’s trust in our results and company if we were to change course.”
3. Big Data, Machine Learning, and the Social Sciences: Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency by Hannah Wallach (h/t Arnaud Sahuguet). She addresses the need for social scientists to work alongside computer scientists when working with human behavior data, as well as a prioritization on the question rather than data availability. She also promotes the idea of including a concept of uncertainty when possible.
4. How Big Data Is Unfair by Moritz Hardt. This isn’t new but it is a fantastic overview of fairness issues in big data, specifically how data mining techniques deal with minority groups.
5. How Social Bias Creeps Into Web Technology by Elizabeth Dwoskin (h/t Ernie Davis). Unfortunately behind the pay wall, this article talks about negative unintended consequences of data mining.
6. A somewhat different topic but great article, The MOOC revolution that wasn’t, by Audrey Watters (h/t Ernie Davis). This article traces the fall of the mighty MOOC ideals. Best quote in the article: “High failure rates and dropouts are features, not bugs,” Caulfield suggests, “because they represent a way to thin pools of applicants for potential employers.”

What is Comparative Advantage?

You may have heard about comparative advantage. As a concept, it’s a neat and mathematically valid argument. It goes like this, as described in wikipedia:

Say you have two countries, England and Portugal, which both make and use cloth and wine, say at time 1. Their productivity is described in this chart:

Which is to say that in England, it takes more work than in Portugal to produce one unit of either cloth or wine, maybe because of climate differences. In this sense, Portugal has an “absolute advantage” over England in both categories.

However, as I said, both England and Portugal make and use both products. So, if England needs one unit of each, it takes them 220 hours, and if Portugal wishes to consumer one unit of each, it takes them 170 hours to produce it.

Here’s where trade comes in. Starting at time 2, they decide to cooperate. Let’s say England focused on cloth, and make 2 units of cloth. That would take them 200 hours instead of 220 earlier. And let’s also assume Portugal focused on what it’s good at, namely making 2 units of wine. That would take them 160 hours, instead of 170. Then the countries could trade their extra units to each other, and both of them would have saved time and would have gotten the same amount of stuff.

Actually, there’s another way of thinking about it. Instead of working less, workers in England and Portugal could work the same number of hours and produce more stuff. They could use their extra stuff to trade for new things, and that excess would essentially be proof that this comparative advantage theory is a success.

Criticisms of Comparative Advantage

Comparative advantage is used as a reason that countries should engage whenever possible in free trade; it’s almost a religious belief for some economists. But, as you might have anticipated, there are some serious issues with comparative advantage. For example:

• When comparative advantage kicks in for a given industry, the people in that industry lose jobs. Like wine-makers in England in the above example.  Even cloth makers in England might lose jobs if the actual demand for cloth is limited. Of course, the idea is that the economy of England as a whole benefits, so a few jobs lost should somehow be absorbed.
• Also, you can’t simply expect the country that’s the best at a certain thing to be able to arbitrarily expand that industry and forget everything else. Think overfishing, or overgrazing: eventually there are diminishing returns.
• Next, technology comes into play. When one country figures out how to be incredibly productive due to technological advantages, like for example huge farming machines and equipment, then it’s essentially impossible for other countries, without access to such technology, to compete, even if they have good climates. That means most farmers in other countries cannot compete with the United States from a productivity standpoint, for example, even putting aside the ludicrous farm bill, which subsidizes American farmers and further distorts their advantage.
• Speaking of distortions, one argument against comparative advantage is that historically countries didn’t actually become powerful through exploiting comparative advantage and free trade. Instead, they imposed tariffs and such to nourish and grow internal industries.
• If a country buys into comparative advantage, by need or by choice, they often find themselves overreliant on one product, the market of which could be volatile or fail. There’s plenty of historical evidence that this monoculture approach to economics is a bad idea. For example, Ireland went through a famine when there was a blight on their potatoes, even while it was exporting huge amounts of “money crop” grains to England, and more recently Ireland focused heavily on finance and technology, only to be severely hurt by the credit crisis.
• Mostly, though, what is most troublesome about the modern worshipping of comparative advantage is that we end up using it as an excuse to exploit people. As my friend Jordan Ellenberg explained:
  

  If you apply comparative advantage to, say, the US and Bangladesh, what you get is “given existing conditions, the US should make computers, not work very hard, and be rich, Bangladesh should stitch T-shirts for Old Navy at 30 cents an hour, work really hard, and be poor.”

• Not that they don’t want jobs in Bangladesh. They do, and generally speaking trade agreements with poor countries help people in those countries. It’s just that we have to also acknowledge our moral responsibility to people and to reasonable working conditions.

How does this relate to marriage?

Well, first let’s think about how to apply the theory of comparative advantage to a marriage, which people tend to do. The idea is that, instead of splitting up the chores with your spouse half and half, which causes unending arguments about whose turn it is, as well as wasted productivity, we instead decide “who’s good at what” and divvy up the chores in a more scientific manner.

Growing up, I did almost all the household chores while my brother did very few (and the ones we kids didn’t do, my mother did). it wasn’t because my parents told me that, as a girl, I was the natural choice, but because I just “seemed better” at everything. The result was that I did everything, and slowly my “advantage” over my brother – defined here as efficiency, not actual advantage – which was at first small, became large.

Of course nowadays parents rarely ask their kids to do chores, so chores have mostly become a marital dispute. And given that women are expected to be – and have been trained to be – both better at and more willing to do housework, they tend to have more practice at multi-tasking and the dishes.

We arrive at a problem similar to the Bangladesh/ US situation above. Again, Jordan nailed it:

In the sexist soup straight couples all swim in, “don’t keep score, everybody do what you’re best at” seems to invariably end up at the equilibrium “woman does 75% of the shitwork” and what the comparative advantage crowd says is you are not even allowed to be mad about this, women, it is ratified by science, accept that like the Bangladeshis you are in your proper place in the equilibrium state.

One of the problems with applying an economic theory to a marriage is that we don’t actually keep track of how much time it takes us to do various things, and even if we did do that we’d probably do it wrong. Just imagining watching the clock during dishes or laundry sounds silly, and never mind with being in charge of the grocery list, since depending on how you measure that, it could either take no time at all or take all your time. Plus, when you find yourself being petty about small things, you end up measuring your marriage along those petty lines, and even thinking about it that way.

My advice to married couples is to ignore scientific arguments, and instead think about a system that will minimize longterm resentment, which is poison in any marriage or relationship. And that might mean using comparative advantage in part, both as a way of figuring out what people are good at and what people like to do, but it will also probably include doing stuff that you hate and you’re bad at sometimes just to understand what the other person goes through.

After all, the essential ingredients in any marriage is a sense of teamwork, the dedication to alleviating the other person’s suffering, and a promise to encouraging one another’s fulfillment. And economics doesn’t have much to say about those things.

You might have heard about “the five love languages.” They come from a ridiculously popular book by Gary Chapman by the same name, and they are purportedly the following:

1. gifts,
2. quality time,
3. words of affirmation,
4. acts of service (devotion), and
5. physical touch.

Chapman’s idea is that, in order to be happier with your loved one, you figure out how they like to receive your love, instead of just doing to them what you’d have done to yourself. So you might like hugs and physical touch the most, but they might need you to say kind things to them. So you say nice things, and then they give you hugs, and everybody’s happy.

I like this list because it really does seem like some people respond more to certain things than others. Personally I’m a touch person, and someone who likes gifts seems almost fake to me, but putting them both on a list makes me realize that maybe we’re just wired differently. It helps me understand other people a bit more and reserve judgment.

I want to do the same thing but for work instead of love. The question changes from “how to you want to receive love” to “what motivates you to work?”. I’ve come up with the following list:

1. money
2. security
3. status
4. social connection
5. making a positive contribution to the world
6. relief from boredom/ organizing framework
7. passion

Ideally an employer would offer to people what they care about. Personally I care about making a positive contribution to the world, but most employers only offer money.

I’m the freak here, I guess. Most people would say they work because they get paid. But really it’s not that simple when you think about it. Some people value money past the point of security, which is why I separated out those two. For that matter, some people care about money as status, but on the other hand academics (generally) care about status beyond money, which is why I made status a separate category too.

The next three are self-explanatory, and I think independent, and for the last category I’m including musicians and artists, people who do stuff in spite of having no reason to think it will ever pay.

Well, my list might be imperfect, but I think it’s good enough to make one point. Namely, that most of those reasons are actually pretty much independent of money after all, so maybe I’m not such a freak.

The work versus money issue matters because of the countless discussions about what might happen if we ever get to the “Star Trek economy” stage of existence, where our basic needs are met and we’re capable of doing other stuff. When we have free time and the resources and security not to worry about food or shelter, what would happen next?

Would we all just play video games 12 hours a day and eat too much? Would we feel useless and dried up and depressed?

I think the answer is, it depends on your personality. If you are the type of person who works out of passion, this new world order wouldn’t slow you down a bit; you’d have even more time to pursue your thing. If you want to contribute to the world, or create meaningful social connections, you’d find a way to do that with likeminded people. If you’re an academic who wants to be the smartest person in the world, you’ll have even more time to do that (but probably way more competition for the title).

My guess is that the only people that would be deeply disappointed are the people who now really really like money for its own sake. I don’t really think there are too many of these people, but they are the very people who might create obstructions to the Star Trek economy’s existence, because they are both powerful and rich in this setup, and potentially have the most to lose.

Dearest Readers,

Oh My God! Holy crap!! I’ve got incredible news for you all. Namely, my best friend, who will be henceforth known as Sister Of My Sister, is here with me today to help dole out incredibly unhelpful, entirely silly, and possibly hurtful advice. Congratulations to all of you for receiving it!!

Before we begin, I need to mention my new hero, the woman who has slept with 3000 men:

Captivating! Is that a pole? What is that pole for?

You can read all about her here, my friends. Tell me in comments how much you love her too. What vim! What vigor! Also high on the my-list-of-favorite-people: this lady.

On with the main event! Readers, remember when I complained last week about running out of questions? Well, you’ve responded, for which I am very grateful. My trust Google Spreadsheet (soon to be the “Alphabet Spreadsheet”) is happily filled in with a dozen or so new questions. But that’s not to say it should stop! Please continue to add to my list, because why? Because it is a real pleasure of my life, which I look forward to all week and I am ever so grateful for it.

So please do a sweet Auntie a good turn and:

ask Aunt Pythia any question at all at the bottom of the page!

By the way, if you don’t know what the hell Aunt Pythia is talking about, go here for past advice columns and here for an explanation of the name Pythia.

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I’m on the verge of graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics, and suddenly I’m wondering whether going to grad school is the right thing to do – there are a few subjects (mostly in Complex Analysis) which I really like, and I definitely will keep reading about them in the future. Thing is, I really don’t know if I have what it takes to do research in math. I don’t know whether I should try going to grad school and drop out if it doesn’t work out, or whether I should just be content with my bachelor’s degree and keep reading Ahlfors in my free time.

Thanks for any reply,
E

Dear E,

Here’s the thing. We never know whether we have what it takes for anything. At least we who are not crazy narcissistic don’t. So I’d say, if you love something, and if the signals are good that you are capable (i.e. your profs are encouraging), then follow your instincts. It’s a very good sign that you want to read math in your spare time! Go with that.

Or, in the words of my good friend Jordan Ellenberg, do what you’d do if you weren’t insecure.

Sister of My Sister says: go to culinary school.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

I find this article disturbing. Here’s an excerpt:

[O]ne of academia’s little-known secrets is that private college admissions are exempt from Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination—a shameful loophole that allows some of the most supposedly progressive campuses in the nation to discriminate against female applicants.

Consider my own alma mater, Brown University. In 2014, 11 percent of men were accepted at Brown versus 7 percent of women, according to U.S. Department of Education data.

Brown is hardly the only, or the worst, offender. At Vassar College, the 34 percent acceptance rate for men was almost twice as high as the 19 percent rate for women. At Columbia University, the acceptance rate was 8 percent for men versus 6 percent for women. At Vanderbilt University, it was 15 percent versus 11 percent. Pomona College: 15 percent versus 10 percent. Williams College: 21 percent versus 18 percent. This bias in private-college admissions is blatant enough that it can’t be long before “gender-blind admissions” becomes the new campus rallying cry.

Colleges won’t say it, but this is happening because elite schools field applications from many more qualified women than men and thus are trying to hold the line against a 60:40 ratio of women to men. Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for every two men. . . .

Today’s [admissions] officials . . . fear though that if enrollments reach 60 percent women, it will scare off the most sought-after applicants, who generally want gender balance for social reasons. “Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive,” Kenyon College’s dean of admissions, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, wrote in The New York Times in 2006.

Any comments?

Smart Guy

Dear SG,

Interesting. So you’re saying there’s a de facto affirmative action policy for men taking place in elite colleges.

The statistician in me needs to make the following caveats: some of these statistics could be explained away if we found out that high-achieving girls tend to apply to more places than high-achieving boys on average. Then you’d see many of the same girls applying to a bunch of places, for example, and the boys might apply to fewer.

As a thought experiment, say girls apply to twice as many colleges as boys. From the perspective of the college, among their best applicants they see twice as many from girls. Their acceptance rates, even if they had consistent standards across genders, would be lower for girls. Does that make sense?

Also, keep in mind that a college’s acceptance rate isn’t the same thing as kids actually showing up at college. It could be – and we know it is likely true, in fact – that the same kids are being accepted at a bunch of places and then saying no to all but one. Again, we have to be smart about this, which is all a crazy and inflated system. And without being on the admission committee myself, I really don’t know what’s going on.

Having said all that, I don’t know of any statistics that would make us think girls do apply to more places. I conclude that the stats from the article definitely warrants more investigation.

Here’s another thing to keep in mind. Girls, statistically speaking, are better students than boys, but boys tend to do better on SAT’s at the high end. Personally I don’t think this is all that meaningful one way or another, because both “grades” and “SAT scores” are somewhat arbitrary systems of judgement, neither of which are particularly convincing to me of inner intrinsic worth. Even so, it might be partly responsible for college admissions; colleges might care more about SAT scores than about grades.

I guess that’s what it comes down to: how do colleges decide who to accept? What are their acceptance guidelines like, and are they gender specific? I mean, we might find them discussing the “too many girls” situation, or, more likely, we might just find them trying out different processes until they come upon one that results in “a satisfactory student body.”

A cynical person would point out that what colleges really care about is future endowment contributions, and in our sexist society men are more likely to be the contributors to that. I’m not saying it’s not a factor, but I’m not sure it could possibly be that explicit; it’s more likely to be embedded in an algorithm or at least a process, as many such assumptions are. In any case I’d love someone with more experience in the admissions process at an elite school to weigh in.

Sister of My Sister says she believes that our worst suspicions about the college admissions process are true.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

Which question that you’ve answered most affected you, and what was the effect?

Curiously Hunting And Obviously Sympathetic

Dear CHAOS,

Thanks for the question, it’s brought me great pleasure in thinking back at all the wonderful questions I’ve had the pleasure to answer. I hope it won’t bother you terribly if I admit that my favorite piece of advice wasn’t actually in an Aunt Pythia column at all, but rather was a mathbabe post called How do I know if I’m good enough to go into math?, which, come to think of it, I should have referred my friend E above to as well. Hey E, go look at that post!

Here’s why that post affected me. I met the wonderful young person who wrote the question to me, afterwards, and she told me quite earnestly how much it helped her. She’s now a thriving and ambitious math major at an elite school. What a pleasant experience, to be able to encourage someone like that!

Moreover, when I went to visit my math camp earlier this summer, I was told that this note had been shared with quite a few of the participants as a way to ward off annoying and competitive behavior; hopefully it helped, but in any case I was super astonished at how much it is needed.

I guess I’m saying that, this is the piece of advice that is closest to that fantasy you have, that you could get in a time machine and go back to your previous self and say something like, hey self! Don’t worry so much, everything’s going to be okay, and you can go ahead and start feeling good now! Because there’s really no time to lose when it comes to just getting on with your life. And that’s really the best feeling that an inveterate advice giver like myself could possibly feel.

Sister of My Sister says that that post and every other is why mathbabe is her hero.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

——

Dear Aunt Pythia,

My wife of 5 years is a lesbian and I’m not a woman. We’ve known this for about 3 years.

As you might imagine this eliminates the kinds of sex that we find convenient to share with other people in most social settings.

We’ve taken to pretending we’re sexually conventional, even to close friends, because we fear that they’d be really awkward about it if we ever let on. Everyone we have told so far has made a point of avoiding the subject, as if they simply don’t know what to say, understandably I suppose. They’ve been supportive and kind, but awkward.

How can we avoid widespread social awkwardness without feeling like we’re deceiving our friends and families?

Accidentally Asexual Humans

Dear AAH,

Why are you two still married? Are there kids? If I’m a friend of yours, and you tell me this, and you don’t have kids, i’d be anything but quiet. I’d say, get the fuck out!

And that holds for anyone who tells me they aren’t getting regular sex from their partner – unless they have a very good reason, like an illness – and they don’t have kids. If they have kids, then fine, make an arrangement with your spouse to get some outside action while you keep a stable household and until the kids are in college. But for an unromantic atheist such as myself, marriages are not simply friendships, they are sexual arrangements. Moreover, to live a full life you want to at least have the option to get action.

You say you’ve been married for 5 years, and for more than half you’re not having sex. Moreover, it doesn’t seem to be ending soon. I just don’t get it. Your friends are too polite and confused to say what I’m saying now: get out, remain friends, and go find someone who can’t resist your manly self. There are plenty of women looking for a good man that would love to enjoy your company.

Sister of My Sister agrees with me wholeheartedly, but suspects there is some other compelling reason you’ve stayed with your wife and would like you to write back and tell us what that is.

Aunt Pythia and SoMS

——

Readers? Aunt Pythia loves you so much. She wants to hear from you – she needs to hear from you – and then tell you what for in a most indulgent way. Will you help her do that?

Please, pleeeeease ask her a question. She will take it seriously and answer it if she can.

Click here for a form for later or just do it now:

Yesterday I went to a fascinating discussion at the Population Council on child marriage in sub-saharan Africa. Specifically, we heard about the effectiveness of four strategies to delay the age at marriage among girls aged 12–17 in parts of Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Burkina Faso in regions with a high prevalence of child marriage (around 12-18%). The strategies were:

1. holding community conversations about the benefits of delayed marriage,
2. helping pay for school supplies to keep girls in school,
3. giving families with girls aged 12-17 a goat or two chickens in exchange for an agreement that they keep her unmarried for two years, and
4. doing all of the above.

They also had control areas where they did nothing except poll the girls at the beginning and end to see what percentage of them overall were married, had sexual experience, and had been pregnant. There were typically about 2500 girls in each of the three areas.

They also split the girls further, into two age ranges: 12-14, and 15-17. There are, sadly, many girls in that younger group getting married, sometimes without even knowing in advance that they were to marry, and not knowing or even meeting their husband in advance of their marriage day.

The researchers kept track of effectiveness as well as cost for each of the strategies, both per vulnerable girl and per “avoided child marriage”. A few comments:

• A local economic condition in one region – I think it was Tanzania – namely a situation where all the local coffee farmers were swindled out of their pay, resulted in worsening poverty and dramatically increased child marriage in that region.
• While giving a family a goat or two chickens might sound like a bizarre incentive to avoid marrying their daughter, it is common in Burkina Faso (but not in Ethiopia) to offer dowries in the form of livestock.
• In fact, the reasoning is often desperate and economic: I need these cows, I will give up my daughter for them.
• In Ethiopia, if I remember correctly, it’s a social bonding issue, where you are bound to marry your daughter to a neighbor’s son out of a sense of neighborliness. It’s also hard to refuse these requests.
• There’s also fear that parents have that their daughter might become pregnant before they are married, so they marry her off before that can happen.
• They also worry about their girls becoming “old maids” if they’re not married by 18.
• Different strategies to delay marriage seemed to work for the younger girls than for the older girls.
• Often the young girls who are going to be married young are also not going to school, so it makes little sense to focus efforts only on girls in school.
• As the closing speaker pointed out, these girls’ sexuality has been utterly commoditized for the marriage market, and their autonomy is basically nonexistent. In that sense, even delaying marriage from 12 until they are 16 makes a real difference in their negotiating power.
• Not to mention that, the younger they are married and start having babies, the more likely they are to live in poverty for another generation.

It’s refreshing to see scientific experimental design and data collection being used for such a good cause! I was really impressed by their approach and intelligence over at the Population Council, and I just subscribed to be notified of their future events and research announcements here.

Some of you may have seen the recent New York Times article entitled Teacher Shortages Spur a Nationwide Hiring Scramble (Credentials Optional). As the title indicates, it turns out that not too many people are throwing their hat into the school teacher ring recently. And given the enormous turnover, this is bad news for the profession.

I’ve got a general rule about such headlines that I like to follow. Namely, whenever we hear about a “labor shortage” in a given profession, we should think about four things:

1. Wages
2. Conditions on the job
3. Benefits, including retirement
4. Cost/ length of training

So for school teachers, we might break it down like this:

1. Wages – median at around $58K, has been rising a bit ahead of inflation if I’m eyeballing this graph correctly
2. Conditions on the job – much worse in the past decade due to the Value-Added Model, and other Education Reform measures which remove autonomy and force teachers to teach to the test
3. Benefits, including tenure and retirement – under relentless fire from gleeful Republican politicians
4. Cost/ length of training – sizable, which means that it might take the profession quite some time to recover

When you take the above points together, you realize that it’s not a salary thing so much as an environment that has become toxic. A capable person, however earnest, would think twice before entering such an industry. This is particularly true right now, when tenure is on the chopping block but the salary hasn’t risen to compensate for the added risk.

Teachers, as a profession, are not so different from truckers, who I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. We’ve got some skilled workers whose environments have been severely degraded, and whose salaries have not risen in response. Considering the fact that the economy is somewhat better, this means people are unwilling to go get trained and qualify for such jobs. Moreover, there’s a real reason in both industries to avoid lowering the barrier to entry; we don’t want illiterate teachers nor do we want dangerous truckers. The solutions are obvious: either make their lives better or give them more money, or both.

There’s one more profession that’s going through a “labor shortage,” namely fruit pickers (hat tip Tom Adams). This is because we have many fewer Mexicans coming in for work, and Americans are generally unwilling to break their backs for a measly $11.33 per hour median wage. This is somewhat different from the other industries, because there’s really no lower bar for training, and anyone willing to do the work is given a job. There are also no benefits or job security, and obviously conditions are horrendous.

Even so, the solutions are still obvious: make the job better or pay more.

I’m happy to announce that I’m on the Program Committee for Bloomberg’s Data For Good Exchange. This is a one day event, taking place on September 28th at the Bloomberg offices. It’s been scheduled to lead into the annual Strata NY conference which is run by O’Reilly.

In addition to the event, which will have speakers and keynotes by people like my buddy Jake Porway, there’s a competition for papers that contribute to the public good. The fact that I’m on the Program Committee means that I get to choose a bunch of papers which were submitted according to this call for papers, take a look at the contents, and rate them.

I’ve taken a quick look at the papers and they look pretty amazing. Stay tuned for more.

It’s time to get busy, people. I need to find futurist conferences to go to (and to speak at), I need to hobnob at cocktail parties. Now that I care deeply about predicting and shaping the future, I need to get on top of this shit.

As part of my research, I have stumbled upon Dylan Matthews’s brilliant Vox piece entitled I spent a weekend at Google talking with nerds about charity. I came away … worried. In a word, Matthews agrees with my post from yesterday.

He spent a weekend at an “Effective Altruism” (EA) conference at Google Mountain View, with many other “white male nerd(s) on the autism spectrum” and he came away with this observation:

In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it’s becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a “rounding error.”

This particular brand of futurism takes refuge in “existential threats” which they measure very carefully with lots of big powers of 10. They worship a certain extra-special white male nerd from Oxford named Nick Bostrom. From Matthews’ piece, where a majority of those at the conference were worrying about the risk robots taking over:

Even if we give this 10^54 estimate “a mere 1% chance of being correct,” Bostrom writes, “we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives.”

No, it doesn’t matter what that means. The point is that it’s a way of nerdifying the current messy world and thereby have an excuse for not improving things now.

Matthews sees through this all, in terms of their logic as well as their assumptions. Here’s his logical argument:

The problem is that you could use this logic to defend just about anything. Imagine that a wizard showed up and said, “Humans are about to go extinct unless you give me $10 to cast a magical spell.” Even if you only think there’s a, say, 0.00000000000000001 percent chance that he’s right, you should still, under this reasoning, give him the $10, because the expected value is that you’re saving 10^32 lives.

And here’s his critique on their assumptions:

…the AI crowd seems to be assuming that people who might exist in the future should be counted equally to people who definitely exist today.

Just in case you’re thinking that this stuff is too silly to be taken seriously, some of the people putting money into think tanks that worry about this crap include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and other Silicon Valley success stories. The money, and the Google location, adds to the self-congratulatory tone. An event organizer made this embarrassingly clear: “I really do believe that effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need.”

From left: Daniel Dewey, Nick Bostrom, Elon Musk, Nick Soares, and Stuart Russell. Taken from Vox by Anna Riedl.

I find this kind of reasoning very familiar, and here’s why. Anyone who’s worked at a hedge fund has heard far too many people with a similar “Bill Gates Life Plan”: first, amass asstons of money by hook or by crook, and then, and only then, deploy their personal plans for charity and world improvement.

In other words, this whole movement might simply be a way of applying a sheen of scientific objectivity and altruism to a vain and greedy impulse.

I’ve got my work cut out for me. Please tell me if you know of conferences or such which I can apply to.