It is, says Aristotle, the mark of the educated person to seek the appropriate amount of precision for each subject.

Large-scale data collection efforts will likely be useful when they target those qualities that:

Are highly invariant and stable between contexts

Have accessible, mechanical methods for being counted

Do not involve a value decision

One of... See more

One of the book’s central innovations is Nguyen’s notion of value capture , whereby we are offered a simple metric designed to answer a complex evaluative question, and end up outsourcing our own values to that metric. How important and influential is my scholarship? Enter the h -index. How good and considerate am I as a passenger? Enter my uber... See more

I once sat in a room with a bunch of machine learning folks who were developing creative artificial intelligence to make “good art.” I asked one researcher about the training data. How did they choose to operationalize “good art”? Their reply: they used Netflix data about engagement hours.The problem is that engagement hours are not the same as... See more