Replies

Thanks for the link. Different perspective BUMP!

The goal of better decision making is behind the current hype surrounding big data, the emergence of “evidence-based” everything—policy,—medicine,—practice,—management, and issues such as climate change, fiscal predictions, health assessment, even what information you are exposed to online. The field of statistics has been addressing the reliability of results derived from data for a long time, with many very successful contributions (for example, confidence intervals, quantifying the distribution of model errors, and the concept of robustness).

The scientific method suggests skepticism when interpreting conclusions, and a responsibility to communicate scientific findings transparently, so others may evaluate and understand the result. We need to bring these notions into our everyday expectations when presented with new computational results. We should be able to dig in and find out where the statistics came from, how they were computed, and why we should believe them. Those concepts receive almost no consideration when findings are publicly communicated.

I’m not saying we should independently verify every fact that enters our daily life—there just isn’t enough time, even if we wanted to—but the ability should exist where possible, especially for knowledge generated with the help of computers. Even if no one actually tries to follow the chain of reasoning and calculations, more care will be taken when generating the findings when the potential for inspection exists. If only a small number of people look into the reasoning behind results, they might find issues, provide needed context, or be able to confirm their acceptance of the finding as is. In most cases the technology exists to make this possible.

Victoria Stodden
Associate Professor of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Where Did You Get That Fact?

https://www.edge.org/responses/what-should-we-be-worried-about