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Rachel Thomas Profile picture
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5 Oct, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Pundits urge people to “listen to the science,” as if “the science” is a tome of facts and not an amorphous, dynamic entity. The naive desire for science to remain above politics meant many researchers were unprepared for a crisis that was both scientific & political to its core. Pundits have urged people to “listen to the science,” as
The pandemic hasn’t just been a science story. It is an omnicrisis. One must understand not just virology, but also the history of racism & genocide, the carceral state, nursing homes, historical attitudes toward medicine, social media algorithms, & more.
theatlantic.com/science/archiv… But the pandemic hasn’t just been a science story. It is a
Much of journalism is fragmentary. For science, that means treating individual papers as a sacrosanct atomic unit and writing about them one at a time. But for an omnicrisis, this approach leads only to a messy, confusing, & ever-shifting mound of jigsaw pieces. @edyong209 Much of journalism is fragmentary: Big stories are broken d
Above quotes from "What even counts as science writing anymore?" by @edyong209. I recommend reading in full:
theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

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More from @math_rachel

Rachel Thomas Profile picture
4 Oct
"My concern is that reducing humans to acting as data sources is fundamentally inhumane."
-- Alan Blackwell 1/ dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.714… What if the human and computer cannot be distinguished becau
"But whereas the core problem of symbol-processing AI was its lack of connection to context – the problem of situated cognition – the core problem of machine learning is the way in which it reduces the contextualised human to a machine-like source of interaction data." 2/ To summarise this section, it has drawn comparisons between
The user is effectively submitting to a comparison between their own actions and those of other people from which the model has been derived. In many such comparisons, the effect will be a regression toward the mean. 3/ Whether or not the result is immediately useful, the work of
Read 5 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
1 Oct
When patients reject a mental health (mis)diagnosis for symptoms they know have physiological origins, it is *not* bc they are devaluing mental health.

Patients do this bc they know that it will lead to ineffective treatments & useless research. 1/5
There's a pernicious cycle: label a poorly understood illness as psychogenic ➡️ don't invest money in researching the physiological origins ➡️ claim the lack of evidence on physiological mechanism proves it's psychogenic ➡️ repeat

2/5
Bonus: if patients are not "rational" enough in their suffering as medical establishment offers them nothing ➡️ use this as further evidence that their symptoms can't have physiological origins 3/5 During the pandemic, America has often seemed divided betwee
Read 6 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
25 Sep
Medicine, like all of science, is political:
- which questions get asked
- which projects get funded
- how debates get framed
- who the researchers are
- context of data (what categories, what labels, which biases, what is left out)
- whose suffering is counted 1/
Science does not just progress inevitably, independent of funding and politics and framing and biases. 2/
Activists of ACT UP pushed USA govt & medical establishment to stop ignoring HIV/AIDS in the late 80s/early 90s, and to invest more in researching & addressing it. The huge progress that has happened in HIV/AIDS research & treatment would not have happened otherwise. 3/
Read 13 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
23 Sep
Queensland police to trial AI tool designed to predict and prevent domestic violence incidents. This raises a number of concerns 1/
theguardian.com/australia-news… h/t @benhutchinson
The police superintendent says that they have removed raw data about ethnicity and geography as part of effort to avoid bias.

This does not prevent bias, at all. Machine learning is all about picking up latent variables. More on this topic: 2/

Almost half the women murdered by an intimate partner in Qld had previously been labelled by police as the *perpetrator* of domestic violence.

All data has context, and "racism, poor community relationships, misogyny" part of the context of this data 3/

theguardian.com/australia-news…
Read 5 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
19 Sep
Corporate-funded efforts to downplay covid are using strategies straight out of the climate denial playbook, funding contrarian scientists, misleading petitions, social media bots,...

blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/09/13… @GYamey @gorskon 1/ Jeremy Baskin at the Melbourne School of Government has note
In many cases, it is literally the same billionaires & corporations funding climate change denial and covid minimization, opposing public health measures 2/ On 9 April 2021, Open Democracy reported that Oxford Univers
It is critical for physicians, scientists, & public health officials to realize that they are not dealing with an orthodox scientific debate, but a well-funded sophisticated science denialist campaign based on ideological & corporate interests 3/ How best can scientists push back against the AIER and GBD?
Read 6 tweets
Rachel Thomas Profile picture
13 Sep
[Faulty] assumptions in design & deploy of AI systems:
- user is an individual
- individual prioritizes personal well-being
- text & context can be separated
- the only useful knowledge is that produced through rational instrumentality...
jasonedwardlewis.medium.com/from-impoveris… @jaspernotwell The epistemology problem stems from a series of assumptions
"...This makes AI system engineers blind to vital aspects of human existence — such as trust, care, and community — that are fundamental to how intelligence actually operates." 2/ The epistemology problem stems from a series of assumptions
"The people who produced that data were not asked if it be used this way, they were not compensated for this use, & the use does not benefit them directly.

Indigenous communities have long histories with people like this. We recognize them for what they are: colonizers" 3/ What does this mean for the goose presently laying all the g
Read 4 tweets

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