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- Mar 8, 2002
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This isn't a meaningful distinction. If I am a prominent flat earther activist I would be both standing against the societal consensus viewpoint and representing the consensus viewpoint of my constituency. I don't believe Cathy represents the consensus of data scientists and institutional consumers of these models in terms of her activism towards transparent models. If it were, Google wouldn't be making photo recognition algorithms that labeled black people as gorillas, and we'd know how credit scores worked. Most people just don't talk or think about how these algorithms impact peoples' lives, which makes her work valuable.
I should have been more clear. Her axioms are those of "liberals", which is about half the US.
Like I've said, she is technically impeccable. However, her politics highly color her assessment of her industry. She is quite open about this. It's in the book. But I think that it detracts from what she writes. Ymmv.