November 2022 Articles

Do not, to quote the [Oxford English Dictionary], “represent as a small thing” the difficulty of something you’re asking someone else to do, when you’re not inside their head and don’t understand what they see and feel. The word “just” is a signal that you’re not taking their problem seriously.

So, don’t do that.

I’d like to say “Just don’t” but obviously shouldn’t.

So the chant over there is “No algorithms on Mastodon!” This chant is wrong, and the discussion around it teaches us that we need clarity on what algorithms are, what moral weight they can carry, and whether they can be avoided. (Spoiler: They can’t.)

This all started when I interjected here, and the longest and most twisted Mastodon thread I have so far seen ensued. Let’s start with my initial remarks:

I disagree. An algorithm is not intrinsically bad. As long as we understand that it represents the interests of whoever paid to have it constructed. I think an algorithm with human values that simply wanted to enrich experience is perfectly possible.

I haven’t seen one, probably because nobody has ever had a financial incentive to construct it.

Mastodon would be a good place to try to make one.

Algorithms, and user interfaces, are all inherently designed and biased in some way to achieve an outcome. For example, at TrueNorth, we would display certain information for the Payments team when they were preparing checks for all of our truckers. That screen was sorted in a certain way and displayed certain information — it wasn’t the raw data from a single table in the database but rather multiple tables joined together. I think we developed a good algorithm but certainly one that could be improved from a process perspective (“How can we help the Payments team process payouts faster while maintaining quality and accuracy?”).

Tim’s right, algorithms can be, and are in many contexts, good!

[Andy Jassy] said something like this: “All these leaders are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.”…

I can’t remember the details of how our findings got back to Andy. They were of the form “Ledgers are useful, cryptography tech is useful, blockchains aren’t, the field is full of grifters, but we could build distributed-ledger infrastructure and then these cool services on top of it.”

As Tim puts so well: “There are many among Amazon’s senior engineers who think blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.”