A feature of medicine is that decisions are taken frequently on the basis of uncertainty. This should be recognized in the curriculum. Training in medical school is therefore expected to instil both the knowledge necessary to solve problems with clear-cut answers and the capacity to reason and act in situations which do not have only one solution.
—Benbassat & Cohen (1982)
✏️ Paris
Having recently been to a lot of museums throughout Europe (I am currently taking a coffee break at the cafeteria in the Louvre), I have some thoughts about the difference between modern and historical art. I visited some modern art museums and, with minimal exceptions, most of the art left me underwhelmed and wondering how it even got considered for showing.
It is not that modern art is bad, but it more so the fact that what great works of arts strive to be — permanent — the modern art piece has yet to achieve, whilst the works of old have met that criteria by virtue of existence. There was a quote that encapsulates this perfectly:
What modern man has completely lost is the desire for permanence. His works no longer aspire to last eternally, but simply to fulfil their small, limited, momentary vision of the instant. Modern man does not understand -too obsessed with himself- the meaning of the word eternity. He wants it to be he himself, personally, who wants to exhaust all the creative possibilities that were previously conceived in centuries, he wants it to be he himself who enjoys the applause which before only arrived after death.
In our secular, dopamine-chasing society, the desire for permanence, eternity, and the approval of God has been replaced with a lust for temporary satisfaction of the senses and the praise of our contemporaries.
Deus dat incrementum.
💡 Food for Thought
3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
Matthew 7:3-5
🧬 Paper of the Week — Data Vision: Learning to See Through Algorithmic Abstraction
Citation: Passi, Samir, and Steven Jackson. "Data vision: Learning to see through algorithmic abstraction." Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing.
Learning to see through data is central to contemporary forms of algorithmic knowledge production. While often represented as a mechanical application of rules, making algorithms work with data requires a great deal of situated work. This paper examines how the often-divergent demands of mechanization and discretion manifest in data analytic learning environments. Drawing on research in CSCW and the social sciences, and ethnographic fieldwork in two data learning environments, we show how an algorithm’s application is seen sometimes as a mechanical sequence of rules and at other times as an array of situated decisions. Casting data analytics as a rule-based (rather than rule- bound) practice, we show that effective data vision requires would-be analysts to straddle the competing demands of formal abstraction and empirical contingency. We conclude by discussing how the notion of data vision can help better leverage the role of human work in data analytic learning, research, and practice.
See you next week!
AT