Template:M intro design how the laws of data science lie: Difference between revisions

[[how the laws of data science lie|In]] 1983 philosopher [[Nancy Cartwright]] wrote the seemingly scandalous {{Br|How the Laws of Physics Lie}} — it is not quite the post-modernist tripe it sounds, but rather a serious and literate work of analytical philosophy. Cartwright’s point was that scientific laws are formulated in conditions so rigid, isolated and controlled that, even though they might be perfectly valid within those conditions, they are practically useless “in the real world,” where those conditions have no hope of existing. So the principles of Newton’s mechanics, assuming as they do no inconveniently intervening forces like friction, gravity, inelasticity, might plot the trajectory of an object on a graph, but have no chance with the proverbial [[Crisp-packet blowing across St Mark’s square|crisp packet blowing across St Mark’s Square]]. You could spend a lot of time with a slide rule and an anemometer; when you look up the packet will be gone.

We tell ourselves that data models can predict our behaviour, are unfailingly accurate, that we should yield to their greater power. We no longer need “thick” human rules of moral principle to moderate our behaviour, because machines can systematically apply infinitesimally thin rules that equably adjudicate on any given particular. This is all the more concerning with the advent of [[neural network]]s and [[large language model]]s that we readily confess we do not understand at all, but we were already there, in our collective obeisance to, for example, the truth of DNA testing, or GPS navigation, or automated self-triage. It ''seems'' plausible; we don’t feel like we have good grounds to challenge it, so we defer to it. We suppose spitting in a tube can tell us with certainty that we are 99.4% Scottish, 0.2% North African with a smudge around Scandinavia, less than 4% Neanderthal, but don’t pick up any African heritage at all — despite the fact that every human on the planet is, ultimately, 100% African by origin (''homo sapiens'' diverged from ''homo neanderthalensis'' hundreds of thousands of years before any human departed Africa).

These thin rules ''lie'': they give us a false comfort in the truth of the things they opine about, the same way science does.<ref>{{author|Nancy Cartwright}}, {{br|The Laws of Physics Lie}}.</ref> So there aren’t ''really'' 590 calories in that burger — it seems plausible if it is printed on the menu card, but the more permanently it is printed the less likely it is to be true. There are not really 49.57km in those directions to the airport, the DNA tests really don’t know whether you are partly Bulgarian — but you as a layperson and none the wiser, so the claim can be made and got away with. It's not independently testable.  How would you know?  Your implicit trust in untestable propositions but gets trust, and from nowhere the [[Data modernism|data modernist]]s have bootstrapped themselves into a kind of credibility.