nothing is objective
The problem: When cultures come into contact, they experience conflicts over meanings. Other peoples do things differently; their beliefs seem obviously wrong to us. But they think our beliefs and practices are wrong. How do we know ours are right? The solution: The systematic mode tries to solve this problem by creating unarguable foundations, to
... See moreReasonable respectability • How meaning fell apart
Data is always an abstraction of reality based on underlying assumptions as to how to categorize the unstructured phenomena of the real world.
Clayton M. Christensen • Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice
good numbers don't mean good impact. We can hit every target and still harm the system we operate in.
zoe scaman • The Work
This two-cultures thinking, moreover, distorts the empirical realities of data collection, the challenging work of forcing unruly phenomena to speak in clean, distinct, ideally quantitative phrases
Melanie Feinberg • The Myth of Objective Data
despite the undeniably consistent picture that we see across studies of scientific data collection, the desire to remove the human from the data in order to enhance objectivity remains very strong. Invariably, it seems like the ethical move.
Melanie Feinberg • The Myth of Objective Data
rather than declare a technology or institution either good or bad by its nature, we recognize instead the possibility that a technology or institution might serve useful ends until it crosses certain thresholds of scale, volume, or intensity, after which it stops serving the ends for which it was created and become, first, counterproductive and
... See more