Chpt 1. - bomb parts

The answer is yes. A model, after all, is nothing more than an abstract representation of some process, be it a baseball game, an oil company’s supply chain, a foreign government’s actions, or a movie theater’s attendance. Whether it’s running in a computer program or in our head, the model takes what we know and uses it to predict responses in various situations. All of us carry thousands of models in our heads. They tell us what to expect, and they guide our decisions.

Sometimes these blind spots don’t matter. When we ask Google Maps for directions, it models the world as a series of roads, tunnels, and bridges. It ignores the buildings, because they aren’t relevant to the task. When avionics software guides an airplane, it models the wind, the speed of the plane, and the landing strip below, but not the streets, tunnels, buildings, and people. A model’s blind spots reflect the judgments and priorities of its creators. While the choices in Google Maps and avionics software appear cut and dried, others are far more problematic. The value-added model in Washington, D.C., schools, to return to that example, evaluates teachers largely on the basis of students’ test scores, while ignoring how much the teachers engage the students, work on specific skills, deal with classroom management, or help students with personal and family problems. It’s overly simple, sacrificing accuracy and insight for efficiency. Yet from the administrators’ perspective it provides an effective tool to ferret out hundreds of apparently underperforming teachers, even at the risk of misreading some of them. Here we see that models, despite their reputation for impartiality, reflect goals and ideology. When I removed the possibility of eating Pop-Tarts at every meal, I was imposing my ideology on the meals model. It’s something we do without a second thought. Our own values and desires influence our choices, from the data we choose to collect to the questions we ask. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics.

Whether or not a model works is also a matter of opinion. After all, a key component of every model, whether formal or informal, is its definition of success. This is an important point that we’ll return to as we explore the dark world of WMDs. In each case, we must ask not only who designed the model but also what that person or company is trying to accomplish.

Racism, at the individual level, can be seen as a predictive model whirring away in billions of human minds around the world. It is built from faulty, incomplete, or

billions of human minds around the world. It is built from faulty, incomplete, or generalized data. Whether it comes from experience or hearsay, the data indicates that certain types of people have behaved badly. That generates a binary prediction that all people of that race will behave that same way.

The question, however, is whether we’ve eliminated human bias or simply camouflaged it with technology. The new recidivism models are complicated and mathematical. But embedded within these models are a host of assumptions, some of them prejudicial.

Prisoners are also asked about whether their friends and relatives have criminal records. Again, ask that question to a convicted criminal raised in a middle-class neighborhood, and the chances are much greater that the answer will be no. The questionnaire does avoid asking about race, which is illegal. But with the wealth of detail each prisoner provides, that single illegal question is almost superfluous.

So to sum up, these are the three elements of a WMD: Opacity, Scale, and Damage.

The role that manifested in diff context, and the way they maintain social norms.