I have spent the summer reading about how math & Big Data shape our understanding of the world. To my surprise, it has affirmed the importance of the humanities. Behind the shiny facade of #BigData lies a series of social judgments made by human beings.

A thread w/ citations. The field of statistics is full of subjective judgments, such as p < .05 being the threshold for significance, or the selection of variables (@JSEllenberg). These are, as @mathbabedotorg puts it, “opinions embedded in models.” But we lose site of this in popular discourse. 2/9