Pine_Barrens

So so true. I get very tired of seeing an "algorithm" get blamed for say, prioritizing administrators to get COVID vaccines over nurses, or in Amazon's case, be extremely discriminative in hiring by overwhelmingly accepting resumes for men

PEOPLE made those models. Algorithms are a reflection of their input data. If you don't have people asking the right questions about the data, you get shitty algorithms as a result, whether they be dumb heuristic based ones like in the first example above, or extremely advanced machine learning / AI based ones like in Amazon's case.

In Amazon's case, the algorithm shouldn't be demonized, but you need to hold accountable a group of data scientists who at NO point identified they had a massive class imbalance in their training data, when it should've literally been Day 1 of exploratory data analysis.

I primarily read non-fiction, but I find it tough to find non-fiction that is written well enough that it almost feels like there is a narrative in the "fictional" sense. An over-arching narrative, if you will. One of my favorites is probably American Prometheus about Oppenheimer. As an author of history non-fiction, what are some of your favorites?