I was happy to see that Hannah Fry has an article in the latest New Yorker titled "What Data Can't Do". I am a Hannah Fry fan. She is the author of "The Mathematics of Love" and is a young British mathematician. I sent the Fry article to two friends and they both liked it.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/29/what-data-cant-do
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Educators are quite aware that humans are deep and complicated. We have all heard tales of the genius who did poorly in school and went on to amazing thinking and performance. A young woman statistician and mathematician is a good candidate for noticing where math and people don't match. Her article is the first I have heard of Goodhart's Law, which can be looked up on the internet and in Wikipedia. I liked the language that said the basic idea is that any indicator that gets attention gets gamed. That means that when the Soviet government gave its textile industry quotas in yards, they quickly reset their machines for narrower, longer products. When payoff for sheeps' wool in another country depended on the weight of the wool, whaddaya know, it was quickly wetted.
But what I didn't expect, Dr. Slygh, was how touching and moving Fry shows our world to be. It is more subtle, sensitive, twisty and deep than can be easily captured in formulas. Yes, we are just at the very beginning of machine intelligence and artificial learning and we will get better at building machines that help us get good answers. But during the building and evaluating, we can see that love, freedom, forbearance and forgiveness in the human heart are jewels of shades and touches that can't be easily captured.
