rules and data
Thinking
I've had a couple of articles out recently. First up is a piece in the latest Kernel (buy your copy here) digging more into the matching algorithm I wrote about in 2023. I'll update everyone once it's up online. From that piece:
Using a centralized rules-based match allows organizations to claim a mantle of mathematical objectivity, conveniently glossing over the possibilities of artisanally hand-matched corner cases or instabilities. ... Hurt feelings and structural inequalities are still a continual backdrop of both matches, but the pain is inflicted at an algorithmic distance. Don’t take it personally, in other words, since only an algorithm rejected you. The algorithm becomes both shield and sword; deflecting criticism while enforcing and even naturalizing institutional preferences.
Despite this technical authority and mathematical aura of fairness, the human elements remain stubbornly unpredictable.
The second article, out last week, is a History News Network newsletter feature about the Privacy Act of 1974 and how you really shouldn't think of it primarily as a Watergate thing. The Privacy Act hasn't been super effective but it's what we have (pending some kind of Congressional miracle), so it is important to understand its context!
From that one, a shred of possibility we can perhaps still cling to:
It is seductive to think that large scale abuses of technology are too thorny to handle directly, and that ousting a disgraced politician might bring an end to those abuses. If it worked with Nixon, why not now? But we should not let a singular comparison to a past controversy like Watergate limit our understanding of what may be possible if we stop accepting privacy violations as the price of modern society ...
As journalist and critic Vance Packard wrote in 1967, the “crucial question is whether we are letting technology get out of hand without a sufficient concern for human values.”
Reading
I'm woefully behind on reading (always), but here are a few interesting tidbits I've read lately:
- This piano production seems absurd in the best way.
- On "doing what you love" actually just being the right kind of pain in the ass
Doing
Generally feeling despair about the news, particularly seeing what's happening here in Chicago, with horrific stories of federal agents violating laws and abusing vulnerable people left and right. It's bad!
In better news, Sukkot has started so I am hoping to do some good al fresco dining this week and wishing I were handy enough to build a sukkah in our backyard. Instead, I will appreciate that we have a backyard at all and good neighbors and oodles of privilege in this life.