Google is taking some well-deserved heat for the lack of diversity of their employees. You can read plenty of people prosecuting that case, so I won’t add much beyond saying that if we accept it when these companies say “we know we have to get better” and leave it at that, they can just keep […]
Continue reading →I have a set of concerns about FiveThirtyEight and data journalism in general, but I also think that there’s a lot of interesting work being done there, and that there’s lots of reasons to be excited about some of the developments in how people are disseminating and reacting to research online. I want to endorse […]
Continue reading →I really had a ton of fun with this one, chatting with Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic about the technology media, online education, and artificial intelligence. Please check it out, and feel free to share.
Continue reading →So I’m going to re-up this piece I wrote about why “correlation does not causation” leads to a research nihilism that is more of a problem than mistaking correlation for causation. I’m doing it because of the viral proliferation of this website from Tyler Vigen, a Harvard law student. The website does what every statistics […]
Continue reading →It’s really to the credit of FiveThirtyEight that they’re making some of their data publicly available. That open access comes in part thanks to this wonderfully smart post by Brian Keegan, a postdoc from Northwestern. In it, Keegan advocates for availability of data by doing a replication of research by FiveThirtyEight’s Walt Hickey. In it, […]
Continue reading →I thought this Tim Harford piece, on the seduction of so-called Big Data and the notion of post-theory, was really good. Harford makes several important points about the ways in which Big Data enthusiasts have underestimated or misunderstood long-term issues with analyzing statistical data. I want to expand a little bit on the question of […]
Continue reading →So this “The Pointlessness of Unplugging” essay has been making the usual rounds. I hate to even write this post, because it’s so obligatory from me at this point, so I’ll keep it short: if the digital life is as fulling, untroubled, and complete as these essayists frequently make it out to be, why do […]
Continue reading →One of the hardest parts of being a researcher is getting access to data. This is particularly acute if you, like me, work in research fields where there is very little grant funding available, making it difficult to give language users incentives to give you samples created under the controlled conditions that are necessary for […]
Continue reading →I’m sorry if I am a grump about artificial intelligence. It just happens to be a subject on which our media frequently appears both insufficiently educated and unwilling to learn. My frustration stems from a basic category error, which can be boiled down to this: My cellphone is much better than my cellphone five years […]
Continue reading →People get on me for being a curmudgeon about techno-utopianism. And I don’t doubt that there’s lots of great benefits to technology that I enjoy every day. But so many people who write about technology make it so, so hard. To wit, “The Dawn of the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” The advances we’ve seen in […]
Continue reading →