[HN Gopher] Seeing Like a Data Structure
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Seeing Like a Data Structure
Author : barathr
Score : 148 points
Date : 2024-06-01 19:53 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.belfercenter.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.belfercenter.org)
| walterbell wrote:
| Useful framing of quantification. A few excerpts:
| The power to see like a state was intoxicating for government
| planners, corporate efficiency experts, and adherents to high
| modernism in general. But modern technology lets us all see like
| a state. And with the advent of AI, we all have the power to act
| on that seeing.. like a data structure.. built for and within a
| set of societal systems--and stories--that can't cope with
| nebulosity.. things are continuous spectra, not discrete
| categories.. avoid being fragmented into nanogenres.
| While large organizations can exist, they can't be the only ones
| with access to, or ability to, afford new technologies.. We can
| create new "federated" networks of organizations and social
| groups, like we're seeing in the open social web of Mastodon..
| where local groups can have local rules that differ from, but do
| not conflict with, their participation in the wider whole..
| The idea of having multiple identities.. some of us have gotten
| used to having a "portfolio career" that is not defined by a
| single hat that we wear. While today there is often economic
| precarity involved with this way of living, there need not be,
| and the more we can all do the things that are the best
| expressions of ourselves, the better off society will be.
| Think of how we use weather apps, fitness apps, or self-guided
| museum tour apps to improve our lives. We need more tools like
| this in every context to help us to understand nuance and context
| beyond the level we have time for in our busy lives.. A tool is
| controlled by a human user, whereas a machine does what its
| designer wanted. As technologists, we can build tools, rather
| than machines, that flexibly allow people to make partial,
| contextual sense of the online and physical world around them.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
|
| _> Unlike epistemic knowledge, which tends to be standardized
| and centralized, metis is characterized by its adaptability and
| diversity. It arises from the accumulated experiences of
| individuals within specific contexts, leading to a rich tapestry
| of localized knowledge systems. This inherent flexibility allows
| metis to evolve and respond to changing circumstances, making it
| highly relevant in various practical domains._
| szvsw wrote:
| Well written and engaging, but I think there is a lot more room
| to really explore what the sociological, techno-economic, power
| dynamic etc ramifications are of _specific_ data structures. This
| doesn't go too far beyond the surface level notion of _data_ ,
| and there are plenty of discussions of the historical
| significance of taxonomizing and "objectifying" and archiving and
| surveilling the world into data from Foucault to Gitelman to Hui
| to Galloway and more.
|
| With a title like the one given, it would be nice to see the
| authors try to tease out what the political implications of a
| linked list, a heap, a stack a directed acyclic graph or a cyclic
| one, a tree, a FIFO queue, a hash table, a point cloud, a data
| lake, actually are... it can be difficult to really wrestle with
| these on an interdisciplinary and simultaneously technical &
| sociological/organizational level, but seems worth doing.
| barathr wrote:
| I like the idea -- I hope someone gives it a try. Like
| combining our essay with "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" and
| CLRS.
| abtinf wrote:
| Word salad.
| szvsw wrote:
| Sorry! More succinctly: the authors explore politics of data,
| as opposed to politics of data _structures_. I'm curious what
| the latter would really look like.
| walterbell wrote:
| Any recommendations from other writers on "politics of
| data"?
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| It really is, it seems more like satire of a comment than a
| comment.
| Zababa wrote:
| Yeah, the author does not seem to know what a data structure
| is, or assume the reader does not know and won't mind.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Feels that if anything, the author is describing
| computational abstractions, not data structures per se. They
| mention the term in the text, but then continue to say "data
| structure" while talking about everything _except_ data
| structures. For example:
|
| "a local cafe is no longer a community hangout but a data
| structure containing a menu, a list of reservation options,
| and a hundred 5-star ratings"
|
| This description is focusing on the "not data structure"
| parts like what is there, what it means, and what can be done
| with it; the data structure part would be, how it's arranged
| and what the impact of that is.
|
| It's still clear what the author means, and they are using
| the relevant terminology, just the irony is in details being
| named opposite to what they should be.
| barathr wrote:
| It's a general-audience essay, not one targeted towards the
| HN community. So unfortunately there's little opportunity
| to delve any deeper into what specific data structures are
| involved in holding the data and the difference that might
| make. There _are_ data structures underneath in the excerpt
| you pulled out and they 're so common in code that we don't
| even notice it. (Even something as simple as this: certain
| data structures are better for finding recent / first items
| and others are better for finding "top" / largest items.
| That has implications that ripple upward and can skew what
| users are shown.) It would be nice to consider the
| differences in how different data structures store data and
| their broader implications.
| Jensson wrote:
| That sounds like a database, how is that not a data
| structure? And to that data structure the cafe is just a
| bunch of values, which he listed. That is how you see
| things like a data structure would.
|
| Definition of data structure: "More precisely, a data
| structure is a collection of data values, the relationships
| among them, and the functions or operations that can be
| applied to the data".
|
| Maybe you would want more generic data structures, but it
| is used accurately here.
| _glass wrote:
| In my PhD thesis I am doing this, but at an organizational
| level, how algorithms are managed and organized, i.e., via task
| lists, inside of the system, e.g., the debugger, or virtual
| meetings. There was a clear discovery of the movement away from
| the code, but also that we should really think about how the
| algorithm sees things, and how it is taking on a subjectivity
| on its own, as an actor.
|
| This approach is postmodern, by describing hyper-reality, so
| taking in things that management theory would approach as only
| superficial, and putting this into the foreground. Your idea is
| actually brilliant, to go one step further and check the
| individual implementation details. I think there is some work
| about algorithms, but mostly for the AI case.
| abtinf wrote:
| Ted Nelson was talking about this decades ago. Prophetic.
| whoisstan wrote:
| Any links?
| tiptup300 wrote:
| I found this article, enjoyable, assuming the OP might not be
| a fan though.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The one data structure that crops up again and again when looking
| at complex systems is the graph. Nodes on the graph represent the
| components and elements like state variables (e.g. population,
| resources, temperature, servers and clients, etc.) of the system,
| and edges between nodes represent interconnections, e.g. flows of
| matter, energy or information between nodes.
|
| A good introduction to this way of looking at the world is
| "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows. Important
| concepts include analyzing systems to determine their relative
| robustness or fragility under stress, the nature of the feedback
| loops in the system (possibly some nodes are connected by
| partially directed edges, so flows in one direction are easy but
| not in the other), what kind of temporal delays matter the most
| (e.g. how long does it take between creating a change and seeing
| the result of that change), and so on.
|
| Given the natural utility of graphs in modeling systems, it's
| really a bit strange that graph theory really only developed in
| the 20th century, with some minor exceptions like Euler and
| Kirchhoff. It's interesting to think about an alien civilization
| whose mathematics began with graphs and how it might have
| developed.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> alien civilization whose mathematics began with graphs_
|
| They might be pleased by 2024 silicon for matrix (a.k.a.
| graph/AI) math: Apple, Qualcomm, Intel and AMD devices with
| 30-100 TOPS NPU.
|
| https://github.com/topics/social-network-analysis
| 0xWTF wrote:
| How much you want to bet one or both of these folks saw patio11's
| Seeing Like a Bank here on Hacker News a few months ago, read it,
| then read Seeing Like a State, and then wrote this?
|
| Because I did the same thing (my version for my problem still in
| draft)
|
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38180477
|
| Also, Seeing Like a State seems to be something of an cult
| classic on this forum:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=seeing+like+a+state+site%3Ay...
| barathr wrote:
| We started writing this essay about 3 years ago (and first read
| Seeing Like a State about 15 years ago -- it's a book that
| should be read and re-read many times). It takes time to write
| something this long, and if I could have I would have kept
| editing it for another year.
| richrichie wrote:
| This is one of my favourite books.
|
| Covid response is a perfect modern day example.
|
| This book also convinced me that all that net zero
| interventions and other related exercises will end in a
| disaster.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> will end in a disaster_
|
| Sadly, not before migration of earnings and control.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| early stringent covid responses(such as in China) probably
| saved millions of lives in the responsive countries, but i
| guess post-covid will be litigated with vibes not numbers
| whimsicalism wrote:
| as much as I enjoy Patrick's writing, i was assuming it was
| solely a reference to Seeing Like a State. and yes it's a cult
| classic among the bay area rat/libertarian-esque folks, had
| never heard of it before coming here
| Zababa wrote:
| > Two decades ago, in his book Seeing Like a State,
| anthropologist James C. Scott explored what happens when
| governments, or those with authority, attempt and fail to
| "improve the human condition." Scott found that to understand
| societies and ecosystems, government functionaries and their
| private sector equivalents reduced messy reality to idealized,
| abstracted, and quantified simplifications that made the mess
| more "legible" to them. With this legibility came the ability to
| assess and then impose new social, economic, and ecological
| arrangements from the top down: communities of people became
| taxable citizens, a tangled and primeval forest became a
| monoculture timber operation, and a convoluted premodern town
| became a regimented industrial city.
|
| One thing that I remember from Seeing Like a State is that people
| used to be judged by village tribunals, and now we have fair
| trials at the state level. People used to live in the same place
| all their life, now we can go in many places. Making things more
| legible can mean destroying a forest by making it into a
| monoculture timber operation. It can also mean allowing all kind
| of people to live as long as they pay taxes, offering them
| freedom that they couldn't find in a smaller structure.
|
| I think it's very important to remember that the map is not the
| territory, that unknown unknowns exist as well as known unknowns,
| that trying to impose to people a specific way of life will often
| not make them happier. But also that technology has meant better
| lives for most people on this planet.
| temporarely wrote:
| This is a general cognitive problem in reducing a higher
| dimensional object to a _lower dimensional representation_ for
| processing. For a complex entity like society and /or human
| wellbeing, it seems inevitable that the representation will
| mask important non-tangible/non-measurable dimensions of the
| object being considered.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Some dimensional reduction is always possible, due to the
| Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma. For example, for 8 billion data
| points, reducing to 1400 dimensions enables preserving
| distances within +- 50% (that can probably be tightened a
| bit) regardless of what the uncompressed data is.
| avs733 wrote:
| >now we have fair trials at the state level.
|
| Another framing is that we now have a larger and more
| formalized structure for trials that we perceive as more fair
| because it is more structured.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| I get the idea, but a lot of these examples seem dubious to me.
| Between Facebook's advertiser interest groups and Tiktok's
| "uncanny" subconscious-tapping For You page, the Spotify example
| is pretty benign?
|
| > Spotify sees us like a data structure when it tries to play
| music it thinks we will like based on the likes of people who
| like some of the same music we like.
|
| I see how data structures figure into the implementation, but
| it's also easy to see how "music recommendations crowdsourced
| from people with similar taste" is a desirable goal. I'd assume
| that Spotify had to "restructure" its data to get this to provide
| better recommendations and run more efficiently.
|
| I think you'd have a much easier time selling the
| dystopian/soulless vibe looking at Pandora and their Music Genome
| Project [0] (even if it actually provides really good
| recommendations, in my experience anyway).
|
| Other examples I just don't see where the data structure is.
| "Thai Food Near Me" is SEO-optimized or whatever, but in the end
| it's just a catchy name, not really materially different from
| calling your shop "World's Best Cup of Coffee".
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project
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