TL;DR — Because unobservable constructs hold ‘surplus meaning,’ your metric is not your construct.
Back-to-basics: on poor conceptualizations in AI work - (Un)rigorous AI
TL;DR — Poor conceptual foundations can severely undermine the credibility and reliability of knowledge claims. (And, no, your metric is not your construct.)
The Metric Is Not The Mission: The Finished Internet
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and as…
How to counter "everything is a construct" worldview?
Many of the people in humanities I encounter seem very wedded to mindset I refer to as "construct = everything". For example, they say bazar things such as gender is 100% a construct. They say...
All Those Metrics Bleed Your Obsessions - Aaron Ross Powell
The internet once encouraged us to build entire identities around our weirdest, deepest fascinations. Then metrics and distribution flattened those obsessions into fungible content.
Notes on software quality
“The absence of problems” is the best definition I can come up with for quality.
Comprehension Debt - the hidden cost of AI generated code.
Comprehension debt is the hidden cost to human intelligence and memory resulting from excessive reliance on AI and automation. For engineers, it applies most to agentic engineering.
The Genius Who Invented Reverse Mathematics
From an Extractive to a Non-Extractive Economy: Disentangling the Building Blocks of Non-Extractive Economic Practices
The paradigm of contemporary business is extractive: oriented towards extracting ever more unpaid energy, resources, money, personal data, labour, health and we
Descriptions Aren’t Prescriptions
When we look at a representation of reality, we can choose to either see it as descriptive, meaning it tells us what the world is currently like, or as prescriptive, meaning it tells us how the world should be. Descriptions teach us, but they also give us room to innovate. Prescriptions can get us stuck. One place this tension shows up is in language.
Axioms and Computation
We have seen that the version of the Calculus of Constructions that has been implemented in Lean includes dependent function types, inductive types, and a hierarchy of universes that starts with an impredicative, proof-irrelevant Prop at the bottom. In this chapter, we consider ways of extending the CIC with additional axioms and rules. Extending a foundational system in such a way is often convenient; it can make it possible to prove more theorems, as well as make it easier to prove theorems that could have been proved otherwise. But there can be negative consequences of adding additional axioms, consequences which may go beyond concerns about their correctness. In particular, the use of axioms bears on the computational content of definitions and theorems, in ways we will explore here.
How To Think Real Good | Meta-rationality
Practical epistemology: heuristics for how to think about difficult things, particularly using formal methods.
Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy
Amazon.com: Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy eBook : Mitchell, Sandra D.: Kindle Store
Reconciling truthfulness and relevance as epistemic and decision-theoretic utility.
When the Scoreboard Becomes the Game, It’s Time to Recalibrate Research Metrics - The Scholarly Kitchen
Today's guest post discusses research metrics and their relationship to research integrity, inclusivity, and long-term impact.
The internet has evolved to foster a fatal expectation: that the things we depend on every day are free. They aren't, but we're allowed to pretend they are with the help of ad-driven business models. The real cost is substantial, and can be measured in time, money, relationships, health, and more.
Fund Your Internet
fundyourinternet.org
