Social scientists KNOW these answers:
"Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston?" AnnaLee Saxenian @BerkeleyISchool & Woody Powell of @CASBSStanford@Stanford know this.
"Why did the Industrial Revolution start when it did?"
<Shakes her head> 1/4
To be fair, the rise of the industrial revolution gave rise to the entire disicpline of sociology to empirically measure the changes happening to people & society as the the economy changed. It was 'Progress Studies 1.0', if you will. 2/4
What is the effect of culture on the economy? Oh hi, Max Weber! How do economic changes destablize social order? Oh there you are @emiledurkheim! What caused the Industrial Revolution? <forgive me for not tagging Karl>. 3/4
But I've got binders of syllabi of people grappling with these questions about today's technological and economic changes. Many of us would be happy to help, @patrickc & @tylercowen Please, just don't call the work we are doing 'understudied' if you want to work with us. <fin>
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A key Mu3k theory made it into the @nytimes opinion pages this week. Touted and burnished by a professor at a top university WITHOUT transparency that Musk funded him for $10 Million for the research. How? 🧵
Humanity is collapsing from population decline. Sound familiar? It's the pet theory of ultra-rich Western white guys like Musk. He funded the center run by the author of this @nytimes op-ed with a $10 million grant. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
What I find EXTRAORDINARY that this funding is not listed on website for the center, the Population Wellbeing Institute, nor did the author say in his op-ed bio that he leads PWI. But Bloomberg broke this story last month about Musk's donation to PWI. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
"If you do not have symptoms, you must not seek a test, as the scientific evidence shows that the test may not be able to detect whether you have the virus."
How in hell are we going into a second wave with this as the NHS messaging?
I say this having returned from a US state (KY) with free, rapid, on demand testing. Waste a test? Nobody wants to do nasal swab tests for fun. I flew back to the UK knowing I wasn't putting my family at risk (neg.)
And now I sit in 14 days legally mandated quarantine because I actually follow the rules.
The best minds in AI ethics are not even one step removed from this mess.
The goals here were clear: preserve standardisation in unprecedented times. But public trust? Fairness? Equity? People in charge ranked those goals lower than that of standardising marks across schools. But absence of 'ground truth' here -- 2020 individual exam results --> FAIL.
We need instead to understand how these systems are rolled out in practice -- not just open the so-called black box but what's around that box: who built it, who is using it, what are they doing with it, who do they think it is for, what do people know/THINK they know about it.
Data are for 2017 and cover the whole year. Of course we've only had 6 months of Covid data in 2020 (Feb-Aug), but already it it is the third top cause of death in the US. cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr…