Wrap-up and Assignment

Wrap-up

The intent in providing these 5 case studies is to give you some reference points to compare/contrast against when thinking of new applications of data science. It’s not going to be the case that every example you see will correspond exactly to one of these case studies. However, you can hopefully take some of the key takeaways from each case study as a guiding set of questions or things to think of when considering the ethics of an application.

If you find that you see something that doesn’t look quite right in the work you do or see, try to identify what assumptions are being made and why that might lead them to the wrong conclusion. It’s rare (but not impossible) that people do a bad or incorrect analysis maliciously. Rather, they normally don’t think of one of these common pitfalls and that lack of awareness leads them astray.

Ask yourself hard questions about your projects: Who are the stakeholders? Who will this help and how? Who might this hurt and how? Whenever you are doing anything with modeling, uncertainty will be a fact of life. Think about what errors are tolerable and which are not, and design your system to make errors less impactful. There is a famous quote often attributed to the statistician George Box that says:

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

Assignment

Your practice problem for today is to write down a reflection on what you learned today and sharing your opinion or experience relating to one of the topics addressed in this lesson.

A good reflection is unique and reflects on what you learned and specifically talks about one of the concepts from the reading (i.e., demonstrates that you did the reading). This can be in the form of sharing your opinion on one of these case studies and whether or not it’s ethical to use them, adding on to the considerations we shared (or objecting to any of the points we shared), or relating what you learned to some other application you have seen. You do not need to talk about every case study in your response, it’s okay to focus on one ; you are more than welcome to relate different case studies though! Additionally, you can respond to someone else’s reflection to add a different perspective or disagree with their point and elaborate on why; a debate is good, but remember to be respectful and make sure we are asking critical questions about what we believe! Do remember that you are just one voice and other people likely have different opinions than you. On top of your reflection or response to someone else’s reflection, you are welcome to pose any additional discussion questions that people can follow up with!

Your Task

Write your answer down in your own space.