So Much Straw

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It is said that on 6 December 1273, while he was celebrating mass, a great change came over Thomas Aquinas. At the age of 49, his Summa Theologica ("Summary of Theology" – nearly 1300 pages) unfinished, he stopped writing. To his faithful secretary and companion Reginald of Pipersno, he said, ‘Reginald, I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw. Now, I await the end of my life of my works.’ Aquinas died three months later.

All our talk about God is halting, partial, hopelessly inadequate. This does not mean we should not hold firm beliefs about God or do the best job we can as philosophers and theologians. It simply means that no matter how much skill or effort we bring to the job, God always remains in part a mystery. The gap between God and our ideas about God was, we believe, salvifically narrowed by God’s revelatory initiative, but not closed.

Like Aquinas, all Christians can see that human talk about God ultimately comes to an end. It’s best efforts are like straw.

Stephen T. Davis, Logic and the Nature of God

Entrenching Ourselves

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The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal standpoints and social positions, the more it appears as if we have discovered the right course and the right deals ideals and principles of behavior. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many—far too many—aspects of life which should have been experienced lie in the lumber room among dusty memories. Sometimes, even, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.

CG Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

How Numbers Can Lead to Biases

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To simplify the world enough that it can be captured with numbers means throwing away a lot of detail. The inevitable omissions can bias the data against certain groups. (Deborah Stone in her book Counting: How We Use Numbers to Decide What Matters) describes an attempt by the United Nations to develop guidelines for measuring levels of violence against women.

Representatives from Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand put forward ideas about types of violence to be included, based on victim surveys in their own countries. These included hitting, kicking, biting, slapping, shoving, beating, and choking.

Meanwhile, some Bangladeshi women proposed counting other forms of violence—acts that are not uncommon on the Indian subcontinent—such as burning women, throwing acid on them, dropping them from high places, and forcing them to sleep in animal pens. None of these acts were included in the final list.

When surveys based on the U.N. guidelines are conducted, they’ll reveal little about the women who have experienced these forms of violence. As Stone observes, in order to count, one must first decide what should be counted.

 

Hannah Fry writing in The New Yorker

Data Science articles Nov 2021

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Top applications of convolutional neural networks

Understanding factor graphs 

Russia’s anti-satellite strike missile test could plague space domain for ‘decades’

Drexel University AI expert Matthew Stamm explains how technologists debunk deep fake videos

Researchers are launching an open-source machine-learning database of chemical synthesis procedures that they think will benefit artificial intelligence algorithms and spur development of predictive chemistry tools 

The algorithmic feedback loop

“The goal of a recommendation algorithm isn’t to surprise or shock but to affirm. The result is more of the same: a present that looks like the past and a future that isn’t one.”

User experience in Stan and TensorFlow Probability

What's the difference between data analysis and data science?

Simulation-based inference and approximate Bayesian computation in ecology and population genetics

5 mistakes you should avoid when writing SQL queries

“Predictive analytics tends to encode historic harms into our planning, limiting our sense of possibility...such technology will keep us bound to the past, stuck in our old patterns of oppression—unless we choose to imagine something better.”

All you need to know about text preprocessing for NLP and Machine Learning 

11 ML Algorithms you should know

Learning resources to accelerate your data science career

Data science used to be a very dry job. It was seen as nerdy but now it's creative. Communication matters because you have to sell what you uncover and that means telling stories around data.

US Air Force researchers want help developing artificial intelligence & machine learning for quick adaption to changing high-intensity aerial battle conditions

DoD IT agency gets chief data office to help shift toward automated cybersecurity

They Probably Aren’t

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Studies show that we consistently overestimate how much people think about us and our failings, leading us to undue inhibition and worse quality of life. Perhaps your followers or neighbors would have a lower opinion of you if they were thinking about you—but they probably aren’t. Next time you feel self-conscious, notice that you are thinking about yourself. You can safely assume that everyone around you is doing more or less the same.  

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

What Sarah Hale Did for You

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In 1621, famous pilgrim William Bradford proclaimed a day of feasting to commemorate the first harvest after a long year of suffering. That became America's first Thanksgiving Day. But as the colonies grew prosperous, the people forgot all about Thanksgiving and the meaning it held for their ancestors. The holiday was revived for a time under George Washington, but general interested in it dropped steadily. Finally, it was observed in only a few communities and that was sporadic because there was no set date.

Then, a determined woman named Sara Hale appeared on the scene. She was a young widow from New Hampshire. In 1822, she found herself with five children to support. She turned to literature and became the editor of a woman's magazine. Like most editors, Sarah was a crusader. It was her belief that the government should make Thanksgiving a national holiday. She pounded away at her idea for years. Three presidents turned her down. But the fourth finally agreed with her. In 1863, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday of every November as our national day of Thanksgiving.

Now, you probably never knew that Sarah Hale did that for you. Her fame rests more on the ditty she wrote in 1830. We’ll never forget her for that simple poem that begins, “Mary had a little lamb…”

Derric Johnson

The Social Media Distraction

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I think the reason that we seek distraction (from social media) is that working on stuff that we care about is often scary. It brings us into contact with all the ways in which we’re limited—our talents might not be up to what we’re trying to do, and we can’t control how things will unfold. If you’re writing a difficult article, you don’t get to know in advance that it’s going to come out well, which can make you feel constrained and imprisoned by reality. Meanwhile, the internet feels limitless, like you’re an all-powerful consciousness surfing the unlimited waves of the web and social media. It’s very relieving.

Oliver Burkeman quoted in The Atlantic

I don’t know who I am anymore

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In order to know who I am, I must also know who I am not. The point of departure in personal myth-making is the dawning realization that I am not what I was. I am not a child anymore. The adolescent takes leave of the frameworks and certainties of the past and searches for new answers to new questions in life. Certain authority figures are made into negative identities. At the time they are created, they personify what an individual doesn't want to become.  They are the first villains and fools in the adolescent's new story. While there are villains, there are also kings and queens.

In world mythologies, the young hero frequently receives critical help from Weis benefactors— sages, goddesses, and supernatural aides.  Without their help, the hero's journey is probably doomed. We should not be misled, therefore, into thinking that mythmaking is a solitary quest. There are indeed dangerous to face, and risks that we all must take, and take alone. But the adolescent’s search for identity is initiated and played out in a social context. We come to know who we are through relationships and in social settings. To depart from the past is not to Leave the world behind. It is rather to move from one world to another. 

Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By

When the optimization mindset fails us

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Technologists are always on the lookout for quantifiable metrics. 

But simple metrics can take us further away from the important goals we really care about, which may require multiple or more complicated metrics or, more fundamentally, may not lend themselves to straightforward quantification. This results in technologists frequently substituting what is measurable for what is meaningful. 

The realm of worthy ends is vast, and when it comes to world-changing technologies that have implications for fairness, privacy, national security, justice, human autonomy, freedom of expression, and democracy, it’s fair to assume that values conflict in many circumstances. Solutions aren’t so clear cut and inevitably involve trade-offs among competing values. This is where the optimization mindset can fail us.

Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, System Error

The History of the Self

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To create a personal myth is to fashion a history of the self. A history is an account of the past that seeks to explain how and why events transpired as they actually did. History is much more than a chronological listing of names, dates, and places. It is a story of about how the past came to be and how, ultimately, it gave birth to the present. It is a truism that the historians understanding of the present colors the story he or she will tell about the past. When the present changes, the good historian may rewrite the past— not to distort or conceal the truth, but to find one that better reflects the past in light of what is known in the present and what can be reasonably anticipated about the future. 

Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By